My original SSD on the Dell XPS was only a 128GB drive. I wanted to have more room on the SSD to install a few different VMWare virtual Guest Distros.
So, I bought a nice very speedy Samsung 500 GB 970 EVO Plus, M.2 SSD. :-)
The original OEM SSD was I believe a M.2 SATA drive. The new SSD is I believe a faster PCIe SSD M.2 drive.
I Googled how to get the back open on the Dell XPS 13" and swap out the SSD. The back cover is quite a tight fit and took a fair amount of carefully prying to snap it loose. Replacing the SSD was dead simple. Just remove 1 screw holding the SSD in place and slide in the new SSD M.2 drive.
I did not put the Widows OS on the drive. Just a Linux Distro.
I did have a great deal of trouble getting a Linux Distro to install. I kept getting errors at the end of the install, about not being able to write files to the drive or some something similar. It may have been some error having with trying to put GRUB on the Partition??
Tried numerous times trying to install MINT 19.1 from a usb thumb drive. Mint Live loaded up fine, from the usb drive but the install always crapped out.
Went and got MXLinux and put it on a thumb drive and the Live Distro loaded up fine but again, the install crapped out. I think I may have missed the info that MXLinux was going to install to the usb thumb drive.
I tried installing MXLinux again and finally it installed perfectly to the SSD. :-) I was getting a little worried that the PCIe SSD was not able to run on the Dell XPS or that the SSD was faulty.
I have barely had much chance, yet, to see how I will like MXLinx, but so far it seems pretty similar to Mint Linux in finding my way around the desktop and the different setups for wifi, etc.
The Dell XPS does seem to be very quick to respond with this new SSD and MXLinux Distro.
"The Dell XPS does seem to be very quick to respond with this new SSD and MXLinux Distro."
Let's see. Xfce and ssd. You'll be able to name the laptop 'Greased Lightning', and put pictures of Stirling Moss (rest his soul) on the cover.
Interested to see how it works as a host. As a client I always found xfce to be troublesome using a number of different distros. Found Mint to be good as host or client.
Feels so good to get a new drive and have that lots-of-empty-space feeling, huh? It's certainly not as fast as m1 or m2 but I remember when I upgraded from 64 GB to 500 GB, I could breathe again. If you ever get the chance, try fitting Windows 10 and a mainstream Linux distro on a 64 GB drive over a couple of years of updates, I dare ya!
Strange that you had an odd issue with Linux Mint. Perhaps the thumb drive is starting to act up. It's possible to boot a Linux distro from a thumb drive and think everything is fine, until it's not. I've had it happen once or twice when I skipped the sum check on the ISO file. Checked the md5sum after it happened and the number wasn't the same. It just takes a few bits in the wrong place that allow it to boot but not properly run the installer. Or maybe, for whatever reason, Linux Mint just doesn't like that drive.