I have an old Dell XPS 9560 notebook. It has a dying SSD. The SSD is M.2 SATA, which is not a good choice for performance. The XPS can support NVMe drives in the same socket, so I went shopping for one. (I bought this computer used, before the pandemic. The seller said he had problems with the original SSD so he replaced it with this SATA drive. There is a chance I'll have trouble with an NVMe drive.) I checked: this XPS does not support HMB. HMB has been an important technology for making NVMe drives cheaper. It allows some of the host computer's RAM to be used by the drive, eliminating the need for on-SSD RAM. So: I kind of need a drive with on-board RAM. There are not that many of them left. I also prefer TLC as opposed to QLC since TLC generally has better endurance. And sometimes higher speed, especially for sustained writes. I found it hard to search for an SSD with these attributes. They aren't often spelled out in listings so Amazon search and AliExpress search are not great. I ended up buying one of these: <https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003788387057.html> That comes in several size variants, but I don't want the -T models since they have no on-board DRAM. I will find out if the "metal heat dissapation vest" prevents it fitting in my notebook. If it doesn't fit, I can find it a home elsewhere. Mystery: In the past DRAMs on NVMe drives seemed to be 1G (small sample of inexpensive drives). HMB buffers seem to be much smaller. For example, on my desktop, the Crucial P3 Plus 1TB NVMe's HMB seems to be 32MiB. That seems to be so much smaller that it must be doing something less than the on-board DRAM would do. Finding HMB size: On my desktop, I followed some AI advice from DuckDuckGo: $ sudo nvme get-feature /dev/nvme0n1p1 -H -f 0x0d The last line of output said: Host Memory Buffer Size (HSIZE): 8192 The AI advice said that that was the the size of the HMB in bytes. That turns out not to be the case. It is the size in memory pages (4k on my machine, I think). This is from a note to an answer in an old stackexchange page: <https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/681131/how-to-check-change-nvme-hmb-on-linux> So AI helped but was wrong in an important detail (by a factor of 4k). The stackexchange answer was similarly wrong but had a correcting note (coincidence???). There may be future war stories when I get this drive and try to install it. Any recommendations for cloning the old drive, skipping bad spots? - I have Windows and Linux partitions - I have an NVMe to USB device. - I can boot the computer from a USB stick so I can copy without either source or destination partitions being mounted. - the new drive is larger than the old one.