How to upgrade PCIe SSD drive with OS on Laptop

Hi,
I bought a laptop with 128GB of PCIe ssd drive on it (Lenovo Legion Y720) and I had the OS on it. Soon, this 128GB was not enought. I got a good deal on used 500GBB PCIe with data on it (even an OS...this SSD was pulled from another laptop).
I ordered a PCIe card to be able to reformat the 500GB SSD but it might take few weeks to receive.

In the mean time, I am trying the 500G SSD. I boot windows 10 from USB, the bios detect the new 500GB with the Samsung part number but when Windows start installing, it does not see that drive.

Is reformatting the PCIe ssd the only way that I can make it work? or there is something I can do in bios for windows to install on it?

Thank you

 

You need to find the manual from Lenovo site and see what and how do the formatting and what needs to be switched in the UEFI for formatting options.

 

Turn off Secure Boot if enabled in the bios, then see if a installation attempt works/detects drive.

 

Did that and still not seeing the drive.

I founded the Win10 driver for that SSD on Samsung website, copy on a USB stick and when windows ask to Format, delete, Load Driver...etc, I browsed to the USB stick on which I copied the driver but Win10 refuse it because it is not signed.

Is it the proper step to do? but how?

Thank you

 

The built in nvStore driver for Windows should be enough. The Samsung driver in certain cases has been known to cause hangs at least in the 960 Pro with new firmware 3B & 4B. Try to put the drive mode in bios to AHCI rather than RaidOn.

 

You can tweak Default NVMe driver for max performance just by changing the Queue Limit using MSIUtils v2 https://github.com/CHEF-KOCH/MSI-utility/releases
Simply increase the MSI Queue from 65 to 2048(Samsung use this value). You'll see best speeds and battery on laptop.

 

Switching to AHCI was the solution. I don't know why it was on Intel Raid before...Thank you

 

I will try that...Thank you

 

Hi, I have another question.
I installed 512GB SSD but Windows10 sees 475GB? Where is the 37GB missing?
Same thing with the secong SSD drive (was formatted completely before)...

Thank you

 

That’s normal, unlike hard drives SSDs actually have all the advertised space but around 6.8% is reserved/overprovisioned for wear leveling and other functions. For usable space like hard drives, SSD vendors use Gigabytes (1000 Megabytes) rather than Gibibytes (1024 Mebibytes) so take those differences down to Kibibytes/Kilobytes and you have have like a 6.8%-7% difference. So even though your SSD has 512 Gibibytes of space the vendor uses the conversion difference to Gigabytes as overprovisioning ~36 Gibibytes in Reserve for wear leveling and helping maintaining performance even when the drive is nearly full. Some drives have more overprovisioning like 480 GB drives which are also 512 Gibibyte drives with more factory OP so the drives can stay at peak performance under continual load even when full also to help prevent high write amplification (WA). WA basically means when you write say like 1 byte the drive writes like 3 bytes in reality as it’s shifts data around and clears partially used cells. Also note your SSDs inbuilt controller will use any unused space or unpartitioned space as OP automatically.

Information on OP and WA:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/6489/playing-with-op

Information on common OPs:
https://www.kingston.com/en/ssd/overprovisioning

 

This good to know that it is normal and second that after working as RF engineer for 35 years and interfacing with digital hardware and did some programming I never heard about GiB! I always know that it was on base 2...and a multiple of 1024 MB, always called it GB.
...always something to learn.

Thank you