I had shifted Haskell onto 1 TB of external storage, but my Dell XPS 13 9360’s 220 GB SSD was still nearly full to bursting. Emboldened by replacing the laptop’s battery, I looked to replace the SSD. It turned out to be straightforward.

Storage

Dell’s Setup and Specifications referred to ‘up to 1 TB PCIe/NVMe drive’. Other sources suggested that a larger capacity was possible but I decided to say within that limit.

Dell itself offered up ‘Dell M.2 PCIe NVME Gen 3×4 Class 40 2280 Solid State Drive – 1TB’ for £ 204, but that was much more expensive than other suppliers. My external storage had been Crucial, and I had been pleased with its quality, and I decided to stay with that brand.

M.2 2280 identifies the form factor of the SSD card: 22 mm wide by 80 mm long.

Blog posts explained that the BIOS for the 9360 model of XPS 13 limits the implementation of Open NAND Flash Interface (OPI) to Generation 2 Toggle Mode DDR (Double Data Rate) (GT2). I am not sure that is accurate, but I understood that the model could not take advantage of the full performance of fast SSDs. I decided to use the Crucial ‘P3 1TB PCIe M.2 2280 SSD’. Crucial offered it for £ 108. Amazon offered it for £ 57.

Crucial also provided provided downloadable software to clone the contents of the existing SSD: Acronis True Image for Crucial.

Enclosure

I would need an enclosure to hold the new M.2 form factor SSD card, so that I could clone the contents of the existing SSD onto the new one. Amazon offered a UGREEN enclosure that could accomodate 80 mm cards (as well as shorter ones) with a USB C to USB C cable for £ 18.

Replacement

The steps to replace the SSD were as follows:

1. Put the new SSD card into the enclosure and connect the enclosure to the laptop using the USB cable.
2. Use the Acronis True Image for Crucial software to clone the contents of the existing SSD onto the new one. This was as simple as selecting the ‘Active Disk Cloning’ option, identifying the source SSD from a list, identifying the destination SSD from a list, confirming that the latter was intended to replace the former (and be bootable), and starting the process. The software indicated that it would expand the C: drive to make use of the available capacity and put other partitions to the right of it.
3. Remove the new SSD card from the enclosure.
4. Unplug the laptop, open the laptop case (as for replacing the battery), disconnect the battery cable, drain any residual electrical charge (by holding down the power button), switch old and new SSD cards, reconnect the battery cable, close the laptop case.

I preserved the old SSD card in the enclosure.

When I rebooted the laptop, it now reported that the C: drive had a capacity of 913 GB.