A friend’s daughter has a Dell Latitude E7450 laptop with a 128GB SSD. The SSD in the young woman’s laptop got down to 6GB free and was fairly unresponsive. After a LOT of trouble we finally got a TeamViewer session going and I was able to clear some malware off it and clean the SSD so it had 32GB free space. Using a portable version of TreeSize Free, it looked like iTunes backups (at ~90GB) were almost exclusively the reason for the lack of free space.
Like many young people, this young woman is a prolific user of social media… and iTunes was keeping a rapidly expanding local backup of her 128GB iPhone 6s Plus… complete with all the social media messages and – more importantly – their attachments (SnapChat, Instagram, WhatsApp, iMessage, etc.). (The default backup of an iPhone is offline to iCloud but the default free storage space is only 5GB. This young woman has both an iPhone and an iPad so the default remote backup storage allowance was swiftly consumed. As any of you who have ever had to carry out a restore from iCloud will know, it’s a very, very slow process… and often eye-wateringly expensive if you don’t have an unlimited data plan.)
Problem: iOS 12 was released just a few days ago. (I upgraded my iOS devices and so far they have benefited enormously from performance improvements with no ill-effects at all, even on older devices.) The young woman’s iPhone had no spare storage space to download, let alone unpack the iOS upgrade. IMO it’s a very bad idea doing such an upgrade OTA (Over The Air) and, instead, always advise carrying out the upgrade using iTunes so the upgrade can be downloaded to the Windows/macOS device, unpacked on the device then squirted to the iPhone/iPad/iPod using the USB data/charge cable.
It was obvious the problem wasn’t going to go away yet, apart from storage space, the Dell Latitude E7450 had performed very well.
Solution: I found a Samsung EVO 850 mSata 500GB SSD (i.e. 4 times the size) for a fairly reasonable price and 4 days later it was delivered to me.
I’ve never carried out such an mSATA upgrade before so I experimented on my own Dell Latitude E7450.
Once I had found the right small crosspoint screwdriver and suitable backup media, it turned out that the process was quite straightforward… except that my favourite partitioning tool – gParted – did not recognise the Dell Latitude E7450 mSATA SSD. More about that in another thread… and apologies in advance that most of the photos in this post are poor quality.
Here’s how I did it:
1. Create a Macrium Reflect Free USB boot stick. I used Macrium Reflect 6 Free. (Hmmm… a bit of a lie… ‘cos I created the bootable Macrium Reflect Free USB stick ages ago and use it regularly.)
2. Turn off Fast Start from within Windows so the Dell laptop responds to the F12 function key. (Both hers and mine are set to legacy boot.)
3. Shut down Windows cleanly on laptop so the OS drive’s ‘dirty’ flag is cleared. (If you don’t do this then Macrium Reflect will complain.)
4. Insert the Macrium Reflect boot USB stick and power on the laptop.
5. Press the F12 function key on the laptop when the Dell logo appears. This will invoke the ‘Preparing one-time boot menu’ so you can select to boot from a USB Storage Device under the LEGACY BOOT menu.
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6. Press Return (Enter) (i.e. to boot from the Macrium Reflect Free USB stick) then immediately plug in the backup storage media device. In my experience you may have to do this twice as Macrium Reflect Free appears to be slow to recognise the backup storage device first time round. (In this example I used a 128GB mSata drive in a USB 3 adapter case. If I have only one single criticism of Macrium Reflect Free v6, it’s the lack of an apparent method to force a re-interrogation of attached storage devices.)
7. Backup the laptop’s mSATA SSD to the backup storage device. (Even though I was backing up mSATA to mSATA in a USB 3 storage device it looks like Macrium Reflect 6 Free used USB 2. Consequently the backup took just over 1 hour 40 mins.)
8. Shutdown then disconnect mains power and remove the laptop’s battery. (Be aware that the Dell Latitude E7450 battery release catch is vicious and took one of my fingernails in an instant.) For safety’s sake, press and hold the ‘Power’ button a further 30 seconds to ensure any residual stored power charge is discharged.
9. Remove the 2 tiny crosspoint screws holding the laptop’s underside shell, slide the shell forward and off to expose the plastic caddy holding the 128GB mSATA SSD.
10. Remove the 3 small crosspoint screws securing the mSATA drive caddy.
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11. If you’re just doing an mSATA upgrade then you don’t have to disconnect the mSATA interface-to-mainboard connector. Just flip the caddy upside-down, remove the single securing screw and swap out the 128GB mSATA SSD for the 500GB mSATA SSD
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12. Resecure the caddy and underside shell, battery and power cord.
13. Boot from the Macrium Reflect USB stick then immediately plug in the backup storage media device. (Again, you may have to do this sequence twice in order for the additional device to be recognised.)
14. Using Macrium Reflect, restore the previously created disk image to the 500GB mSATA drive.
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15. Shut down and disconnect the USB boot flash disk and the USB storage disk. (The restore was signigicantly faster at only ~40 minutes.)
16. Reboot again. If all has gone well then the laptop will boot from Windows… but with no extra storage space. You can check this using diskmgmt.msc where it will show the new, unallocated space.
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17. Install MiniTools Partition Wizard Free. I used version 10.2 (after fun and games with version 10.3).
18. Using Partition Wizard Free, select the OS partition ( C: ) then the option to Extend Partition.
19. Use the dropdown to select the Unallocated space then click on the Apply button. (This took moments to complete.)
20. Reboot and check Disk Management (Right-click on Start, choose Disk Management.)
21. Optional – Uninstall MiniTool Partition Wizard Free.
I note the original 128GB mSATA SSD was clearly labelled Samsung but not the 500GB replacement:
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(As thanks, the young woman’s Mum let me have the original 128GB mSATA SSD… so I’ve just ordered another mSATA adapter case.)
Hope this helps…
