Am I blind? No 2TB storage for dell laptops

[lan101]

I have a client that does a lot of DJing. He's going to be upgrading some laptops soon so I was doing some price checking for him. He prefers Dell's because he's always had good luck with them so far. A few years back we upgraded his 1tb hdd's to 2tb ssd's. He'd of course like to stick with 2TB when he buys new ones. Other than the really expensive alienware systems, I'm not seeing any that have a 2TB option. I think the XPS for like $2600 plus also had 1 config for 2TB.

Is this something you can customize by calling and ordering from Dell? I've never dealt with them much directly on these sorts of things. I just can't understand that in 2023 there's not a 2TB default choice. Hell even Apple offers that for an insane price of course lol. I know we could order and just upgrade it but most people I deal with aren't real happy about doing that on a brand new machine. Am I overlooking something? Preferably he'd probably like to stay with a 16 or 17 inch inspiron series as that's what he has now.

Thank you for any pointers on this.

 

[ThatPlace928]

I have a client that does a lot of DJing. He's going to be upgrading some laptops soon so I was doing some price checking for him. He prefers Dell's because he's always had good luck with them so far. A few years back we upgraded his 1tb hdd's to 2tb ssd's. He'd of course like to stick with 2TB when he buys new ones. Other than the really expensive alienware systems, I'm not seeing any that have a 2TB option. I think the XPS for like $2600 plus also had 1 config for 2TB.

Is this something you can customize by calling and ordering from Dell? I've never dealt with them much directly on these sorts of things. I just can't understand that in 2023 there's not a 2TB default choice. Hell even Apple offers that for an insane price of course lol. I know we could order and just upgrade it but most people I deal with aren't real happy about doing that on a brand new machine. Am I overlooking something? Preferably he'd probably like to stay with a 16 or 17 inch inspiron series as that's what he has now.

Thank you for any pointers on this.

Is he replacing his Dell? If so, why can't the old drive be swapped into the new one?

 

[Porthos]

Go balls to the wall https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/gam...ptop/spd/alienware-m18-r1-laptop/wnm18r1cto51

 

[lan101]

Is he replacing his Dell? If so, why can't the old drive be swapped into the new one?

Yeah he's going to be replacing an inspiron 7737 which is from like 2015-2016 era. I'm assuming all the new ones won't have the ability to put in a sata ssd. If so that'd be great. I just know majority are using m.2 now and no area even in the laptop for a sata.

 

[ThatPlace928]

Yeah he's going to be replacing an inspiron 7737 which is from like 2015-2016 era. I'm assuming all the new ones won't have the ability to put in a sata ssd. If so that'd be great. I just know majority are using m.2 now and no area even in the laptop for a sata.

Maybe check into adapters that will convert his drive into whatever is in his new Dell? Have you checked specs on the ones he's interested in to see what kind of drive it is?

 

[timeshifter]

Don't think you're going to find many new laptops that use 2.5" SATA SSDs, which is probably what's in the old Inspirons.

Haven't checked, but I'd think you could buy a Latitude and then replace the NVMe drive with your own.

And, I'd probably steer him to the Latitude lineup vs Inspiron as I think they're built a little better. May also consider a Lenovo ThinkPad T series.

 

[lan101]

Don't think you're going to find many new laptops that use 2.5" SATA SSDs, which is probably what's in the old Inspirons.

Haven't checked, but I'd think you could buy a Latitude and then replace the NVMe drive with your own.

And, I'd probably steer him to the Latitude lineup vs Inspiron as I think they're built a little better. May also consider a Lenovo ThinkPad T series.

Yeah it's looking like we'll just have to replace with the 2tb drives. Yeah for sure on the thinkpad t series. Those are one of my favorites...I believe those have that config so maybe he would go for one of those instead.

 

[lan101]

Maybe check into adapters that will convert his drive into whatever is in his new Dell? Have you checked specs on the ones he's interested in to see what kind of drive it is?

Yeah pretty much all the new ones are m.2 2280 drives and his old dells have samsung sata ssd's. Looking like we will just have to transfer data from old to new...I just was hoping to avoid having him have to upgrade it immediately lol. Just shocks me that some of these don't have a 2TB factory config...just losing money on their part I guess.

 

[Blues]

It is just like when we went from HDDs are the standard to SSDs which was really not even 10yrs ago you still found computers with HDDs.

 

[britechguy]

@Blues

Yep. People don't rush out and ditch equipment that's working just find for their day-to-day use purposes, nor do they upgrade when that's the case.

I expect I'll still be seeing SATA SSDs in various configurations for some time to come since my primary customers are residential. Even small business customers will likely have these for years to come.

P.S. to @lan101 : I suspect that the days of huge on-board storage are numbered as cheap cloud storage becomes more and more prevalent. The fact that it has become so cheap has caused quite a few customers to move long-term storage to the cloud rather than local. I can see, however, why a DJ would want local storage for music, and would like to have a huge internal drive rather than anything external for carrying with.

 

[fincoder]

What I do in this situation is supply a commercial grade laptop like Dell Latitude or HP ProBook/EliteBook, with say 256GB storage, and simply replace the M.2 drive with an after-market one of bigger capacity. Commercial grade laptops have onsite warranty so there's no risk of sending it back with after-market parts and hoping you get the part back. The onsite techs I've dealt with are happy to work around any added after-market parts.

 

[lan101]

What I do in this situation is supply a commercial grade laptop like Dell Latitude or HP ProBook/EliteBook, with say 256GB storage, and simply replace the M.2 drive with an after-market one of bigger capacity. Commercial grade laptops have onsite warranty so there's no risk of sending it back with after-market parts and hoping you get the part back. The onsite techs I've dealt with are happy to work around any added after-market parts.

Yeah that's what I'm leaning towards.