JUNE 2020 PCWorld 91Now, was it much better? No, and I think
the performance benefits are probably
secondary to the more tangible benefits.
Adding another M.2 drive is better first and
foremost because you have more space to
store your files. Moving to 16GB of RAM
allows you to open more Chrome tabs or run
games that require 16GB of memory. That’s
more important than any day-to-day speed
increase.
One final note: Dell specifically asked
us to explore the benefits of installing the
second drive as a RAID 0 array instead of a
separate drive. RAID 0 links two (or more)
drives into one massive storage space, and
in theory can improve performance. I
typically don’t bother with RAID, though,
because the speed increase is offset by
the risk. If one drive in the array fails, the
entire array fails, and you can lose all
your data.
Still, we tried it—and if you’re sticking
with the default Dell-provided drive, I
wouldn’t recommend it. As you’ll see in
the charts above, our benchmarks actually
came in lower (for the most part) when we
set up RAID 0 compared to running
programs directly off our newly-installed
secondary M.2 drive. The Firecuda’s
speed dragged the average up, meaning
the OS and anything else installed only to
the C: drive probably performed better.
Anything we could’ve installed directly to
the secondary drive? It all performed
worse, as a consequence of being split
across the slower Dell drive and the
faster Firecuda.
If you install two zippy new M.2 drives,
RAID 0 might net a slight speed increase.
Otherwise, if you’re just adding a secondary
drive, it’s probably better to take full
advantage of your faster M.2 speeds when
needed, and leave the original drive to
handle the OS and anything that’s less
sensitive.BOTTOM LINE
I hope laptops—especially gaming
laptops—continue to trend toward
upgradability. One of the biggest problems
with gaming laptops (compared to their
desktop counterparts) is they tend to last
only three or four years before they’re
irrelevant. Maybe five if you don’t mind
dipping settings. That’s while costing two
to three times as much as comparable
desktop hardware.
But if you could get in there and replace
some of the parts, you could potentially add
another few years of use. RAM and storage
are a good start, and Dell’s made it such
upgrades easy.
What we really need are CPU and GPU
upgrades, though. That’s trickier, but
imagine buying an Inspiron 15 7000 and
then being able to swap out the already-
dated GTX 1050 for a top-shelf part. That’s
the dream. Maybe one day.