Introduction
In January 2020, I bought a Dell Latitude 5590 laptop. This is my daily use laptop and I use it mainly to write websites, a little batch and PowerShell scripting, a lot of image editing and some light video editing.
The laptop has performed fautlessly since then but in November 2025, I realized that the 512Gb drive is 80% full. I thought it was time to do something before I filled it completely.
My Dell Latitude 5590 laptop hard drive in November 2025
The laptop has 16Gb of RAM, so I also thought about upgrading that to 32Gb.
Windows
Typing winver in a command prompt shows I am running Windows 11 Pro with the latest major update being 25H2. The same information can be gotten by going to Settings > System > About
To get the Windows product key, in a command prompt type
wmic path SoftwareLicensingService get OA3xOriginalProductKey
By going to settings > System (left hand menu) > Activation (main menu) > Activation state (main menu) will give information about how Windows is activated. Doing this on my laptop shows the message "Windows is activated with a digital license linked to your Microsoft account."
Current Hardware
CPU
The laptop has an Intel Core i5-8350U CPU @ 1.70GHz
This is an 8th generation 4 core CPU and not the fastest, Passmark Benchmark and User Benchmark, but is still fast enough for what I use it for.
Graphics
The graphics device in the laptop is the now discontinued integrated Intel UHD Graphics 620 with 128Mb of memory. As I do not play games, this is not a problem.
RAM
The laptop is fitted with two banks of 8Gb DDR4 2400 Non-ECC for a total of 16Gb. This does not seem to be a problem for what I use the laptop for but as it can use up to 32Gb of RAM I thought it might be an idea to upgrade to that.
Drive
The laptop has an M.2 512Gb PCIe NVMe Class 40 solid state drive (SSD). According to the Dell website, it should be able to be upgraded to a 1Tb drive. The PCIe in the Dell Latitude 5590 laptop is generation 3. Gen4 drives will fit into the socket, but will only run at PCIe Gen3 speeds - about half the speed they were designed for.
The Opal SED (self-encrypting drive) is a hardware standard that ensures that if the drive is removed from the computer, it cannot be read on another.
The 2230 and 2280 refer to the size of the drives, 22mm by 30mm or 80mm.
Windows cannot tell the form factor of a drive, but it can report the device name, which can then be looked up and the form factor determined. The name of the drive can be found using Device Manager, Task Manager or by typing msinfo32 at a command prompt.
The name of the drive in Device Manager
The name of the drive in Task Manager
The name of the drive after typing msinfo32
After looking for the drive and visiting several sites, the CA3-8D512-Q11 NVME LITEON 512Gbdrive has an M.2 2280 form factor.
The Dell Community says that the Latitude 5590 laptop should be able to use a 2Tb SATA drive. The Wichita Computer Guy says it is even possible to fit both a NVMe and SATA drive into the laptop. Ithink both these options might be ovrkill for what I use the laptop for.
Winsat and Windows Experience Index (WEI)
Winsat is a simple command line utility to assess various features, capabilities, and attributes of a computer that is part of the Windows operating system.
Running
winsat mem
at various times gave results of
27,437.13 MB/s, 26,736.96 MB/s, and 27,139.96 MB/s which gives an average of 27,104.68 MB/s
Running
winsat disk -drive c
at various times gave the average results of
Disk Random 16.0 Read 116.72 MB/s 7.2 Disk Sequential 64.0 Read 850.72 MB/s 8.3 Disk Sequential 64.0 Write 1579.63 MB/s 8.8 Average Read Time with Sequential Writes 0.078 ms 8.8 Latency: 95th Percentile 0.676 ms 8.5 Latency: Maximum 1.050 ms 8.9 Average Read Time with Random Writes 0.157 ms 8.9
The final figures of each of the above lines are the DiskScore value for each of the tests.
The Windows Experience Index (WEI) scores are no longer found in the Windows properties but can be found by running
powershell Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_WinSAT
at the command line. My laptop returned scores of
CPUScore : 8.9 D3DScore : 9.9 DiskScore : 8.4 GraphicsScore : 7.4 MemoryScore : 8.9
Purchases
After looking at the cost, capabilities and reviews of various drives and memory, what I decided to buy was a Western Digital 1TB WD Blue SN570 NVMe drive ($94.99) and G.SKILL Ripjaws DDR4 SO-DIMM Series DDR4 RAM 32GB (2x16GB) 2400MT/s CL16-16-16-39 1.20V Unbuffered Non-ECC RAM ($109.99).
I've always had IDE / SATA to USB adapters around which I've found to be very handy, but as the computers I have now use PCIe M.2 drives I decided to buy an adapter for those as well. What I chose was the M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure, Tool-Free Installation, USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) to NVME M-Key/(B+M) Key PCIe NVMe Adapter Support UASP and Trim, for SSDs 2230/2242 /2260/2280 adapter ($12.59).
The new drive, RAM and adapter
Preparation
Windows
I could clone the current drive but decided that after five years it was time for a clean Windows 11 install. I downloaded the Windows 11 Media Creation Tool and ran it, putting the files on a spare USB drive. These things are very handy and worth keeping a couple of them around. It only took the tool about 10 minutes to create the bootable USB drive.
User Files
I backup my Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, and Videos directories. I find those are all I need as I have not use for things like the AppData and other directories. I just had to ensure the backups were up to date.
Programs
Over the years I have installed several programs I rarely use. Looking through the installed apps (Settings > Apps > Installed Apps), and my Downloads directory, and knowing what programs I most frequently use, I downloaded new copies of the program's installation files or copied them from my backups.
I really do not use a lot of different software but what I use most often are the Dell Support software, my old Epson Artisan 810 printer support files, Garmin Express, GIMP, Google Chrome, Google Chrome, Microsoft 365, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, PDFGear, PowerShell, Visual Studio Code, and WinSCP
Anything else I want or need I will download later.
System Files
As I run a web server I made some change to some system files, such as the hosts file. I made a copy of these files ready to be transferred to the new hard drive.
The Hardware Upgrade
Adding he new drive and RAM was very easy and only took a few minutes. Turning the laptop over, the seven screws were removed and the bottom taken off.
Opening the 5590 laptop
The RAM are the green items centre right and the drive is in the lower left, under a grey heatsink
The 5590 laptop old 16Gb of RAM
The 5590 laptop new 32Gb of RAM
The 2280 NVMe drive is on the left under its heatsink
Using the same techniques as before I started the upgrade, the drive was recognised as NVMe WD Blue SN570 1T.
Software and Files
As the Windows 11 Pro backup was recently made using the Media Creation Tool, reinstalling Windows and updating it did not take long at all, probably less than half an hour. The software I use most often was downloaded and installed. This took a bit longer than installing the operating system
The amount of software that is included in Windows, I don't think is as bad as some people say. The software I deleted was; Microsoft 265 Copilot, Microsoft Edge Game Assist, Microsoft News, Microsoft OneDrive, Solitaire and Casual Games, Weather, Xbox, and Xbox Live
Rather than copy all my files from the backup I made, I just copied what I use most often.
The newly installed NVMe 1Tb drive
Winsat
The Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) command line (WMIC) is now gone from Windows. Winsat is still there so I ran those tests again:
winsat mem, on average, gave a result of 32,325.63 MB/s
winsat disk -drive c gave an average result of:
Disk Random 16.0 Read 1001.42 MB/s 8.8 Disk Sequential 64.0 Read 1642.33 MB/s 8.9 Disk Sequential 64.0 Write 1667.05 MB/s 8.9 Average Read Time with Sequential Writes 0.067 ms 8.9 Latency: 95th Percentile 0.171 ms 8.9 Latency: Maximum 1.896 ms 8.8 Average Read Time with Random Writes 0.063 ms 8.9