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to learn more now I often get asked by people uh how much storage should I get
for my computer whether it's an SSD or whether it's a hard drive and the answer
invariably is I don't know how am I supposed to know how much storage you
need I can't however what I can tell you
is that for me personally 120 or 128
gigs which is the SSD size that you'll find in a lot of uh more entry-level
machines these days is really not enough for me I find that 256 or 240 gig class
drives are The Sweet Spot in terms of a
price to capacity ratio and if you can go higher and you can still fit that in
your budget then great Now Intel sent over this xps2 Ultra Book which I kind
of fired up and I was like oh it's got Core i5 okay cool it's got you know nice
IPS 19 20 by 8 1080 or whatever it is
that 1080p thing screen um oh it's got a
120 gig SSD so the first thing I did was I was like oh crap can I take it apart
and the answer is yes um it doesn't take a 2 and 1 12 inch SSD it takes an MSA
SSD so this is I think the first time we've really talked about MSA online as
Tech tips what it is is it's a smaller SATA standard so it's still just as fast
as a regular SATA drive in most cases it still uses the SATA inter interface so
it's not like a PCI Express based one or anything like that but what it is is
it's super small so all the flash chips are integrated onto a tiny little PCB
and the controller on there and these this little custom connector here that
doesn't have any housings around it is just a SATA interface with no housings
around it and moved around a little bit so what we're going to do is we're going to walk you through the steps of
upgrading the SSD in your notebook it's really important to find out from the
manufacturer what type of drive your model accepts whether it's a 9mm 2 and
1/2 in drive a 7 mm 2 1/2 in drive a 5
mil 2 and 1/2 in drive or even an MSA or even a proprietary standard like for
example Apple's recent notebooks are often using soldered ssds that are right
on the motherboard so you can't replace them at all and then work from that
knowledge so without further Ado here's my MSA SSD upgrade on the D xps2
relaying two shot one take two so the first step is really more of a before
you begin type thing so here's that uh
here's that drive that I was talking about before because we're using MSA
it's a little bit inconvenient for data migration because we can't just use one
of these handy dandy USB TOA interface cables to just clone the drive before we
even do the transfer um so what we'll have to do is we'll have to actually
back up everything that's on here the good news is because it's a factory load
out um there's not that much data on there so you can actually back up to an
external hard drive or even a large USB key if you happen to have one then you
can manually transfer everything back over to the new MSA Drive once you are
done so you just got to figure out a workflow for yourself if you're not using MSA though it is quite a bit
easier we're using Paragon software for the backup and the restore step two is
to make sure you have a nice safe anti-static workstation in our case
we're using a modm main board from Mod right and we're using the
iFixit screwdriver kit with a Torx five
bit on the end of the screwdriver to get this baby open so step one is to locate
all of the screws and after removing them put them
in a safe place such as a small plastic
container like the one that happens to be included with your drive haha look
how that worked
out once you've removed all the screws
carefully lift up the bottom cover never Force anything remember guys that there
are ports around the outside edges that might stick through the chassis so you
don't want to put unnecessary strain on those now that we've got her opened up
we can take a moment to just admire the uh the workmanship that goes into a
modern Ultrabook so you can see like more than half of the Interior is taken
up by the massive battery which is actually it looks like you could
probably swap it out if you really needed to which is kind of cool um I
also like that Dell made it relatively easy to remove this shell so they did
put crappy torque screws in it but they didn't make it like you know clipped in
or anything like that so you can actually remove it and put it back on without it looking like garbage after uh
you can see the cooling fan for the CPU right here this uses onboard Graphics uh
this is the main motherboard right here where you've got your RAM soldered on um
so it's four gigs of RAM in this machine by default uh the fourth gen one comes
with 8 gigs by default and then there's actually a little daughter board over here that has some IO so they were able
to to get this over here uh right here is your wireless which you can see is
plugged into the antennas which go up here and then probably around the
outside of something um you want you want you want those to be nice and big
and then uh here is our M SATA drive
that we're going to be replacing so all we got to do is peel up this little
cover right here all right and we see
that it is held in by one simple screw now you can see once you remove the
screw that the M SATA drive actually
lifts itself this is okay this is a function of the slot here that it's
supposed to do that which makes it very very easy to carefully so you can see
whatever's in here right now is an oem part number from Samsung so you can uh
see the Samsung flash modules on there
as well as uh I'm not too worried about the warranty on this thing so let's just
go ahead and find out what kind of controller it's using probably Samsung
Samsung is the world's number one SSD manufacturer not just for their own
drives but also for other drives so there's a Samsung dram chip right there
and then a Samsung presumably yep Samsung controller right there so this
is a Samsung SS s so now that we have both ssds you can see that they actually
use very similar configurations cuz there's only so much space on an M PCB
and you have to put four flash chips so here we can flip over the ad dat one
there you go so you're going to have to fit four flash chips your controller as
well as your cache so there's only so many options in terms of layout so
installation is simple we've install it the same way that we took it out so you
actually go in at an angle Fold It Down flat
find that Phillips head screw which is different from all the others remember
anytime you're disassembling a notebook unless screws are like markedly
different from each other and you're not going very far into it you're going to
want to keep all the different types of screws labeled and separate from each
other then we're going to lay this back on top of
it and that is it the physical aspect of
the upgrade is done so as long as our data migration worked we're good to go
now that we're done we can admire the sexy interior which unfortunately isn't
as sexy as the insides of Apple's notebooks they do such a good job like
opening up a Macbook you're just like oh yeah they they put some thought into
that um I mean this ain't bad either but anyway we're going to go ahead put the
cover back on screw everything back into place with our torque screwdriver again
and that's that's that's kind of
it so there you go guys I hope this was informative I've actually done notebook
storage upgrades before but I've never done one with an M SATA drive so there
there you go it's pretty much the same procedure but slightly more different
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