I was looking at ordering a Dell Inspiron, and swapping out the 512GB M.2 drive with a 2TB M.2 drive I already have. The documentation, though, states:




M.2 2230/2280 solid-state drive PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe Up to 1 TB

It also says the limit on a 2.5 in HDDis 2TB? Surely not... Does that just probably mean that the size you can order from them is limited? Otherwise it makes no sense...

I didn't realize you could be limited on max storage size of a drive... Is that accurate?

The Dell chat rep says the motherboard limits the storage size of the drives to 2TB for SATA and 1TB for SSD...

Is that a thing in 2020?

Quote:

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2TB for SATA

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I've got a 4tb sata drive in my PC at home and it's a 10 year old PC. They've got to be talking about the max size you can get directly from them.

Also I think the max consumer size of a SATA SSD is 2tb at the moment, so that's probably also where they're getting that number from.

I think it means the motherboard can't support a bigger drive and you can't upgrade.

That's a dumb limitation to have. Storage is cheap in 2020 but the manufacturers are always stingy with it.

dubi said:

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I think it means the motherboard can't support a bigger drive and you can't upgrade.

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The motherboard doesn't have anything to do with how big of a storage drive can be addressed anymore. You'll have to use GPT instead of MBR, but you should probably be doing that anyways.

Dell sales reps are wrong all the time. That table describes what configurations they offer.

What model are you looking at specifically?

Inspiron 5593

Relevant links:
https://www.dell.com/en-us/member/shop/dell-laptops/inspiron-15-5000-laptop/spd/inspiron-15-5593-laptop/nn5593dssgh
Specifications:
https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/us/en/19/inspiron-15-5593-laptop/inspiron-5593-setup-and-specifications/storage?guid=guid-05db9429-1e46-40f5-b709-7c66b3324d4e&lang=en-us

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The motherboard doesn't have anything to do with how big of a storage drive can be addressed anymore. You'll have to use GPT instead of MBR, but you should probably be doing that anyways.

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What is GPT? MBR?

So what is constraining the SSD size to 1T?

It may not a real constraint, it could just be that Dell doesn't offer 2TB nvme drives for that model.

Crucial's site says it can handle up to 2TB M.2...

https://www.crucial.com/compatible-upgrade-for/dell/inspiron-5593#ssd

MGS said:

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It may not a real constraint, it could just be that Dell doesn't offer 2TB nvme drives for that model.

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This.

dubi said:

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Quote:

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The motherboard doesn't have anything to do with how big of a storage drive can be addressed anymore. You'll have to use GPT instead of MBR, but you should probably be doing that anyways.

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What is GPT? MBR?

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https://www.howtogeek.com/193669/whats-the-difference-between-gpt-and-mbr-when-partitioning-a-drive/