Gadgetory

Corsair RM series power supplies are optimized for silent operation click now to learn more now I often get asked by people 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 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 XPS 12 Ultrabook which I kind of fired up and I was like oh that's got Core i5 ok cool it's got you know nice IPS 1920 by 8 Kennedy or whatever it is that 1080p thing screen 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 it doesn't take a two and a half inch SSD it takes an M SATA SSD so this is I think the first time we've really talked about M SATA on Linus tech tips what it is is it's a smaller SATA standard so it's still just as fast as a regular state of drive in most cases it still uses the SATA interface so it's not like PCI Express based one or anything like that but what it is is it's super small so all the flash chips are integrated on to a tiny little PCB and the controller's on there and these this little custom connector here that doesn't have any housings around it it's just a SATA interface with no housings around it and moved around a little bit so what we're gonna do is we're gonna 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 nine millimeter two and a half inch drive a seven millimeter two and a half inch drive a five mil two and a half inch drive or even an M SATA or even a proprietary standard like for example Apple's recent notebooks are often using soldered SS 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 mSATA SSD upgrade on the Dell XPS 12 releasing two shot one take two so the first step is really more of a before you begin type thing so here's that here's that drive that I was talking about before because we're using M SATA it's a little bit inconvenient for data migration because we can't just use one of these handy-dandy USB to SATA interface cables to just clone the drive before we even do the transfer so what we'll have to do is we'll have to actually backup everything that's on here the good news is because it's a factory load out 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 M SATA drive once you are done so you just got to figure out a workflow for yourself if you're not using M SATA 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 mod mat mainboard from mod right and we're using the iFixit screw driver kit with a Torx five bit on the end of the screw driver 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 our opened up we can take a moment to just admire the 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 I also like the del made it relatively easy to remove this shell so they did put crappy Torx 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 you can see the cooling fan for the CPU right here this uses onboard graphics this is the main motherboard right here where you've got your RAM soldered on so it's four gigs of RAM in this machine by default the fourth gen one comes with eight gigs by default and then there's actually a little daughter board over here that has some IO so they were able to get this over here 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 you want you want to you want those to be nice and big and then here is our M SATA drive that we're gonna be replacing so all we got to do is peel up this little cover right here alright 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 remove so you can see whatever is in here right now is an OEM part number from Samsung so you can see the Samsung flash modules on there as well as 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 SSD so now that we have both SSDs you can see that they actually use very similar configurations because there's only so much space on an MSA to PCB and you have to put for flash chips so here we can flip over the eight 801 there you go so you're gonna 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 put some thought into that I mean this ain't bad either but anyway we're gonna go ahead put the cover back on screw everything back into place with our Torx 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 you go it's pretty much the same procedure but slightly more different don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from our unboxings reviews and other computer videos leave a like if you liked the video leave a dislike if you disliked the video and leave a comment if your mother's hair is not on fire right now