DELL XPS 12 mSATA SSD Upgrade Guide
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,630 words · ~8 min read
0:05
Corsair RM series power supplies are optimized for silent operation click now
0:10
to learn more now I often get asked by people uh how much storage should I get
0:15
for my computer whether it's an SSD or whether it's a hard drive and the answer
0:19
invariably is I don't know how am I supposed to know how much storage you
0:24
need I can't however what I can tell you
0:27
is that for me personally 120 or 128
0:30
gigs which is the SSD size that you'll find in a lot of uh more entry-level
0:35
machines these days is really not enough for me I find that 256 or 240 gig class
0:41
drives are The Sweet Spot in terms of a
0:44
price to capacity ratio and if you can go higher and you can still fit that in
0:49
your budget then great Now Intel sent over this xps2 Ultra Book which I kind
0:54
of fired up and I was like oh it's got Core i5 okay cool it's got you know nice
0:58
IPS 19 20 by 8 1080 or whatever it is
1:02
that 1080p thing screen um oh it's got a
1:05
120 gig SSD so the first thing I did was I was like oh crap can I take it apart
1:10
and the answer is yes um it doesn't take a 2 and 1 12 inch SSD it takes an MSA
1:16
SSD so this is I think the first time we've really talked about MSA online as
1:19
Tech tips what it is is it's a smaller SATA standard so it's still just as fast
1:25
as a regular SATA drive in most cases it still uses the SATA inter interface so
1:30
it's not like a PCI Express based one or anything like that but what it is is
1:35
it's super small so all the flash chips are integrated onto a tiny little PCB
1:39
and the controller on there and these this little custom connector here that
1:43
doesn't have any housings around it is just a SATA interface with no housings
1:47
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
1:51
upgrading the SSD in your notebook it's really important to find out from the
1:55
manufacturer what type of drive your model accepts whether it's a 9mm 2 and
2:00
1/2 in drive a 7 mm 2 1/2 in drive a 5
2:03
mil 2 and 1/2 in drive or even an MSA or even a proprietary standard like for
2:08
example Apple's recent notebooks are often using soldered ssds that are right
2:13
on the motherboard so you can't replace them at all and then work from that
2:18
knowledge so without further Ado here's my MSA SSD upgrade on the D xps2
2:23
relaying two shot one take two so the first step is really more of a before
2:28
you begin type thing so here's that uh
2:31
here's that drive that I was talking about before because we're using MSA
2:35
it's a little bit inconvenient for data migration because we can't just use one
2:38
of these handy dandy USB TOA interface cables to just clone the drive before we
2:44
even do the transfer um so what we'll have to do is we'll have to actually
2:48
back up everything that's on here the good news is because it's a factory load
2:52
out um there's not that much data on there so you can actually back up to an
2:56
external hard drive or even a large USB key if you happen to have one then you
3:01
can manually transfer everything back over to the new MSA Drive once you are
3:06
done so you just got to figure out a workflow for yourself if you're not using MSA though it is quite a bit
3:11
easier we're using Paragon software for the backup and the restore step two is
3:15
to make sure you have a nice safe anti-static workstation in our case
3:18
we're using a modm main board from Mod right and we're using the
3:23
iFixit screwdriver kit with a Torx five
3:27
bit on the end of the screwdriver to get this baby open so step one is to locate
3:31
all of the screws and after removing them put them
3:35
in a safe place such as a small plastic
3:40
container like the one that happens to be included with your drive haha look
3:43
how that worked
3:46
out once you've removed all the screws
3:50
carefully lift up the bottom cover never Force anything remember guys that there
3:55
are ports around the outside edges that might stick through the chassis so you
3:59
don't want to put unnecessary strain on those now that we've got her opened up
4:03
we can take a moment to just admire the uh the workmanship that goes into a
4:07
modern Ultrabook so you can see like more than half of the Interior is taken
4:12
up by the massive battery which is actually it looks like you could
4:16
probably swap it out if you really needed to which is kind of cool um I
4:19
also like that Dell made it relatively easy to remove this shell so they did
4:23
put crappy torque screws in it but they didn't make it like you know clipped in
4:27
or anything like that so you can actually remove it and put it back on without it looking like garbage after uh
4:32
you can see the cooling fan for the CPU right here this uses onboard Graphics uh
4:37
this is the main motherboard right here where you've got your RAM soldered on um
4:40
so it's four gigs of RAM in this machine by default uh the fourth gen one comes
4:44
with 8 gigs by default and then there's actually a little daughter board over here that has some IO so they were able
4:49
to to get this over here uh right here is your wireless which you can see is
4:53
plugged into the antennas which go up here and then probably around the
4:56
outside of something um you want you want you want those to be nice and big
5:01
and then uh here is our M SATA drive
5:05
that we're going to be replacing so all we got to do is peel up this little
5:09
cover right here all right and we see
5:13
that it is held in by one simple screw now you can see once you remove the
5:17
screw that the M SATA drive actually
5:20
lifts itself this is okay this is a function of the slot here that it's
5:26
supposed to do that which makes it very very easy to carefully so you can see
5:30
whatever's in here right now is an oem part number from Samsung so you can uh
5:35
see the Samsung flash modules on there
5:38
as well as uh I'm not too worried about the warranty on this thing so let's just
5:42
go ahead and find out what kind of controller it's using probably Samsung
5:45
Samsung is the world's number one SSD manufacturer not just for their own
5:49
drives but also for other drives so there's a Samsung dram chip right there
5:54
and then a Samsung presumably yep Samsung controller right there so this
5:58
is a Samsung SS s so now that we have both ssds you can see that they actually
6:03
use very similar configurations cuz there's only so much space on an M PCB
6:09
and you have to put four flash chips so here we can flip over the ad dat one
6:14
there you go so you're going to have to fit four flash chips your controller as
6:17
well as your cache so there's only so many options in terms of layout so
6:21
installation is simple we've install it the same way that we took it out so you
6:25
actually go in at an angle Fold It Down flat
6:31
find that Phillips head screw which is different from all the others remember
6:34
anytime you're disassembling a notebook unless screws are like markedly
6:38
different from each other and you're not going very far into it you're going to
6:41
want to keep all the different types of screws labeled and separate from each
6:46
other then we're going to lay this back on top of
6:50
it and that is it the physical aspect of
6:53
the upgrade is done so as long as our data migration worked we're good to go
6:57
now that we're done we can admire the sexy interior which unfortunately isn't
7:01
as sexy as the insides of Apple's notebooks they do such a good job like
7:04
opening up a Macbook you're just like oh yeah they they put some thought into
7:07
that um I mean this ain't bad either but anyway we're going to go ahead put the
7:11
cover back on screw everything back into place with our torque screwdriver again
7:16
and that's that's that's kind of
7:20
it so there you go guys I hope this was informative I've actually done notebook
7:24
storage upgrades before but I've never done one with an M SATA drive so there
7:29
there you go it's pretty much the same procedure but slightly more different
7:33
don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos leave a like if
7:36
you like the video leave a dislike if you dislike the video and leave a comment if your mother's hair is not on
7:43
fire right now