XPS 15 7590 Dual Drive Configuration

Snap. I forgot my old MacBook Pro has all the hardware to run at full 6 Gbps which Apple advertised as a feature. On the other hand, Apple's firmware crippled the bus at 3Gbps. Regardless, running a SSD is a massive improvement over even a 7200rpm HDD. Obviously irritating to have the handicap but the SSD was absolutely worth the investment for speed; silence and battery life were added bonuses.

On the XPS YMMV.

I'll stand by this.​

 

You're mostly correct but some have given the impression you're better off giving up on a dual drive 7590 which is bad advice. Some have indicated the SATA drive might be slow when there's no evidence to back that up. If it's a conventional 5400 rpm drive, there's also little real world difference between 3 Gb/S and 6 Gb/S SATA. And others have indicated you're better off with just a really big nvme drive which is also not true for many use cases especially if you want to dual boot from BIOS or need a second 2TB+ drive without spending a fortune. There are many valid use cases for a dual drive XPS 15 but some in this thread seem to discourage it when it's perfectly workable and gives the XPS 15 a big advantage over some similar notebooks. It's also a plus the XPS 15 doesn't require major surgery to even open and doing so doesn't void the Dell warranty. That's not the case with Apple, HP, Asus, Acer, Lenovo, and many other thin laptops. So my point is users can take advantage of the XPS 15's flexible upgradability rather than being discouraged from doing so.

 

I know what you mean, but I’ve changed my mind. I was using XPS 9550 for 3 years or so, with small battery and biggest SSDs I could get my hands on. Once NVMe hit 2 TB I figured it doesn’t make sense to use SATA anymore so I started using a laptop with 2 m.2 slots. There is nothing above 2TB in NVMe form, btw I’m a big fan of QLC drives as secondary long term storage that sees mostly reads. I kind of need all the storage there is and don’t really care about battery life.

But there are 4TB SATA consumer drives now, hell, I have 7.8 TB Micron SSD. So I went back to NVMe +SATA. The cost of buying higher SKU, replacing battery and risk with not knowing whether any eBay/amazon small battery will actually work with this particular model steered me towards Razer Blade base instead of XPS, and I’m pretty happy. I have 9.8TB of storage with 64 GB of RAM in a small 15 incher that can hold 45+80W combined CPU+GPU power forever. The only problem is that 7.8 TB drive is enterprise, zero power management, I may downgrade to regular 4TB Samsung. It’s warm even at idle.

 

hahaha that is me.

A few people posted here that the extra SATA drive was slowed but I did not see any clear cut evidence one way or the other. Given all the performance shortcuts in the XPS, I am comfortable calling the SATA bay speeds uncertain until proven otherwise.

 

Having migrated my new 56Whr replacement battery and drive cradle from my Precision 5510, I can advise that it's not as simple as just getting the parts and dropping them into the chassis. The SSD is not the core issue, it's the battery. The XPS 15 7590 bios is not aware of the 56Whr charging profile and won't identify the battery since it's not part of a normal configuration for the 7590 builds. This is a major pain point. I looked around on various forums for run by Dell Certified support partners and there seems to be some guidance that when changing the factory battery size, that you should perform a bios reset. However, doing this in XPS 7590 is not as easy as it sounds. The bios software does not permit a proper Factory reset option, and the BIOS resent option only works on the specific value, not on the whole bios configuration. (the reset option has 3 modes, Factory/Bios/Custom but is specific to certain locations and context). My next action is to pull the motherboard out and to pull the actual button battery from the board for an extended bios clear/erase, before re-seating the new 56whr battery I purchased online.

My play B is to put the original 90+ Whr battery back and to use a 2TB M.2 SSD, however, I would really prefer to keep my existing 3TB combo (1 TB NVMe and 2TB SSD Sata), I don't really need the batter life as 80% of the time my laptop is tethered using the D3100 docking station I use, the times I need to move with it are limited and the life is only for 1-2 meetings. Sadly the effort required to make this happen as started to exceed the value.

 

Going to review my new 7590, got some questions.
Currently, I am using matebook x pro with dual monitor setup.

1st, does the 7590 support dual monitor? if so, what is the best connection method?
2nd, does it support 4k or 5k monitor? if so, what is the best setup?
3rd, I heard there is a dock you can buy for better cable management. Any recommend dock to buy for this laptop?
4th, What is the max numbers of monitor you can output for this notebook in 1080p or 4k or both?

Thanks.

 

The inside of a 7590 with the smaller battery