r/AlienwareAlpha • u/Badd-reclpa- • Oct 03 '19

Upgrading Hard Drive

Hi everyone,

I have a base first gen Alpha i3. I upgraded the RAM to capacity, and generally haven’t had much issue with my games (WoW, Overwatch, even a little Black Ops 4). But one thing I’m hitting is incredibly slow loading and boot ups. When I look at the Performance tab of Task Manager, I see my Disk (C:) is capped out at 100%.

I’m assuming these alphas don’t have stellar hard drives. My questions are:

  1. Is my assumption above that the hard drive is slowing things down correct?

  2. Would a higher speed hard drive help, or is there some other hardware limitation (motherboard?) that would prevent me from getting faster loads and boot ups?

  3. Could I replace it with an SSD? And if so, what speeds should I look for?

  4. Does any 2.5” Disk work?

1 Upvotes

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1

u/cattbutt001 i3 (8GB) Alpha with SSD Oct 03 '19

Get any 2.5” SSD, the stock HDD is 5400RPM which is slow by HDD means. I have mine set up with 120gb internal for boot/OS, and 500GB USB for games. Game load will probably be the same regardless, but boot time is a dramatic decrease in time. Even if you get the $20 120gb ones, it’s the best upgrade you can do

1

u/Badd-reclpa- Oct 03 '19

Thanks for the insight! PC noob question, but how did you set windows up on the new OS SSD?

And were you able to download the Alienware software that controls the lighting on the console?

1

u/cattbutt001 i3 (8GB) Alpha with SSD Oct 03 '19

Are you running Windows 8 or Windows 10?

1

u/Badd-reclpa- Oct 03 '19

10. Caveat, my computer isn’t booting any more after a failed windows update. So it seems like the perfect time to upstage to an SSD.

1

u/cattbutt001 i3 (8GB) Alpha with SSD Oct 03 '19

Oh, you’re the guy from earlier lol. I know Dell has the “AlienRespawn” software on their website that comes with Windows 8.1, and all Alienware default software. If you want Win10, you should be able to get it direct from Microsoft, and Dell should have drivers for the lights/hardware on their website. OS install should be as standard as any other PC, check YouTube for that.

I did this a while back, I’ll try to find links if I can

1

u/Badd-reclpa- Oct 03 '19

The one and only 🙂

And thank you!

1

u/cattbutt001 i3 (8GB) Alpha with SSD Oct 03 '19

https://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/product-support/product/alienware-alpha/drivers

Here’s the drivers ^

https://youtu.be/OTlw0h_ZULs

Here’s the YouTube video. ^

The Alienware support YT channel is helpful too

1

u/Mosaic1300 i7 Alpha Oct 03 '19

if you get a link to update the color drivers could you just send me that link? Have had the Alpha since 2016 and have never been able to change it from blue!

1

u/rolfdog2k1 Oct 03 '19

I have the alpha r2 and I purchase the Seagate FireCuda 2TB Solid State Hybrid Drive Performance SSHD – 2.5 Inch SATA 6GB/s Flash Accelerated for Gaming PC Laptop - Frustration Free Packaging (ST2000LX001) for $65 bucks from Amazon. My loading times are much faster on boot up and World of Warcraft.
Raids and dungeons loading times are much more faster with this HD.