Gadgetory


All Cool Mind-blowing Gadgets You Love in One Place

Kingston SSDNow V Series Notebook Upgrade Kit & Installation Guide Linus Tech Tips

2010-07-07
so I've been promising to do a video about this for a while maybe I haven't been promising the viewers but I've certainly been promising Kingston so I unboxed their notebook upgrade kit with the 128 gigabyte SSD now these series drive quite a while back and so what I'm actually gonna do now is I'm going to upgrade a notebook with it so this is my ghetto-fabulous notebook it's a little on the old side it's got a 70 900 GT mobile in it now I'm in my pajamas now you can totally see that oh well whatever it's YouTube so it's got a dual core 2.0 gigahertz processor in it it's about 4 gigs of RAM I don't know if I already said the GPU I got distracted by the pajama thing 7900 GT so it's a little on the older side but it's still perfectly functional looks like I've gone and forgotten my screwdriver so I guess I'll just go get my backpack here which contains all of the tools that I need for upgrading a notebook all right so that's the first thing you'll need yes checklist so notebook check SSD check screwdriver uncheck all there's the hard drive boost I've been looking for that ok I found it also a spoon some business cards for NCIX where I work and another spoon for whatever reason this is getting pretty personal okay there we go Philips head screwdriver okay so the first thing we're gonna do is locate wherever it is that we need to open up to get at the hard drive so it fits anywhere standard two and a half inch hard drive does so we're just gonna go ahead and start opening up the case of this notebook and then the parts of the process that are gonna be sort of more difficult are the ones where we're actually going to transfer all of the data for my existing hard drive which I believe is a Western Digital Scorpio of some sort and we will take all of that data transfer it over to the SSD and then in theory the whole upgrade is completely seamless and besides my computer being faster I would never notice any difference gotta adjust my camera here I've had a few people ask me how I mount the camera here and rather than answer that question I'm going to make that one of the mysteries like who is the camera man how does Linus hold the camera while he is working with both of his hands and the answer is not a hat contrary to what some of you may believe it is not a hat okay so here we go we just pry it up right there hopefully I don't lose any screws because that would be pretty much a disaster I don't have like replacement screws for my laptop okay here we go so the inside of the laptop see my fans pretty dirty let's just blow on that I got some RAM some Buffalo RAM I got my wireless card there's the GPU it's got like these huge heat sinks on okay let's get to the oh wow my well that's kind of neat so the way this the way the harddrive mounts in my system you can see it is a SATA hard drive but it looks like the screws that we took off here are actually the ones that are holding the hard drive in so it was that simple so here we go ah that's interesting there's some kind of like RMA notes on this I don't remember anything about that looks like it doesn't format well the drive works fine for me it's been working for months so what we do now is you can see that this particular notebook uses the bottom mounting holes so you've got a couple of different options for notebook manufacturers for mounting the hard drive you can either use the side holes which are here or you can use the bottom one so this one as I said three seconds ago uses the bottom one so just take off all these screws and that was it we have removed the hard drive so the next step is going to be the SSD kit so I'm just gonna take that out of there you know once again move that hope I don't lose any screws so notebook upgrade kit inside here you will find everything you need to upgrade so here is the drive cloning software that's gonna be key next we have the SSD itself so why don't we go ahead and do the SSD installation process here so I'm just gonna sort of figure out how I need to orient this so it needs to go in this way so it uses all the same standard mounting holes that a hard drive does you get a lot of questions from people about like how SSDs work compared to hard drives like do you need to configure anything in the BIOS or do you need to you know in reinstall windows or there's all kinds of different questions like is my system compatible with an SSD and the answer is if your computer works with a hard drive it pretty much works with an SSD an SSD doesn't appear any different to the system than a hard drive does the only difference is that it just gets the data for it a lot faster so if anything your system will be happier with you for giving it an SSD to work with ok so there we go standard SATA interface so just go ahead and plug that in right there slide that on in there hopefully that goes breaking anything yeah there we go ok so that was pretty straightforward and the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna take my old drive and we're gonna use the included drive enclosure so we're gonna use the included drive enclosure right here and we are going to install this old so I'm gonna just unlock this so that I can actually go ahead and again standard say the interface you just slide that right in there okay it is now officially installed hey slide that back all right so now you just need a USB cable I think I got a spare one anyway so I don't really need to unpack that but you can never have enough USB cable so that's one of the rules of life or at least tech life anyway because there's always going to be a situation where you're running all over the place looking for one and you can't find it okay all right he's interested in the computer hi Rumble okay please don't step on the inside of my computer notice he's stepping on my new SSD maybe it will be infused with cap strength and agility now and if that doesn't happen then hopefully at least it's not ruined all right so we're gonna close up the laptop that was it that's how easy it is to change the hard drive in a laptop I mean maybe yours is a little bit tougher but usually you got like a diagram on the outside of the casing that shows you where to access the hard drive ah stupid cat no no no no okay you get down go down over there thank you he went after one of the screws that I dropped because he heard the sound of it falling and he decided that that was a good thing to hunt and probably eat if I'd let him have it they eat bugs you know I actually really don't like bugs this is something I've never mentioned on my video blog before I hate bugs so I found a spider in my bathtub the other day and rather than deal with it myself oh thank you for helping me rather than deal with it myself I decided that I just sick the cat on it so it took him about I don't know 20 seconds to figure out what to do with the spider and to dispatch it for me okay good one not anything okay these crews are not going in for some reason hopefully that will be remedied soon go ahead and screw these in okay so once we're done this what I'm gonna do is I'm going to use the USB cable to access the old hard drive once I turn the system on and then I'm gonna use the included cloning software that Kingston well includes and I'm going to transfer all of the data what I'm gonna hope now something that I totally didn't think of already is that take it off the computer cat there we go what I'm gonna hope now is that I don't have too much data on that hard drive to actually transfer it to a 128 gig SSD because that's one of the big disadvantages that you run into with SSDs is that there just isn't as much storage space on them as a comparable hard drive so here we go plug that in oh great my batteries not charged on my laptop okay I'll be back in a moment laptops plugged in there so we're just gonna start it up might we I mean me here my pajamas and I've plugged in the two and a half inch drive here oh and I what I forgotten to do is open up the optical Bay here and then put in the SSD hard drive cloning software so just like that and hopefully I have this configured to boot to disk first that is my hold on for that starting a Cronus loader yeah okay I brought nevermind I didn't bring anything okay when a protist room is HD so we just clicked that thought it was simple something that you might have to do if your laptop is not already configured to boot from the optical drive is that you'll have to go into the BIOS and just set your optical drive as the next boot device so it may not be quite this simple for you but it should be pretty similar something else I thought about installing in my laptop is the momentous XT because this is a pretty good compromise between hard drive and SSD but it's I mean if you got an SSD it's pretty much the best way to go so I see now that my mystery of how I mount my camera here has now been officially revealed I just have a little tripod that's on my chest so I can kind of adjust the angle like this now you can't see any more hot okay so what we're gonna do is we're gonna click clone disk we're going to click Next to continue we're gonna hope that I don't have don't have too much data on here so Manuel I don't know why but I've had more success with Manuel in the past so the source old disk is going to be on the USB interface here it's going to be the for some reason oh yeah yeah yeah Kingston hard drive enclosure so the click Next and then the destination new disk is going to be the 128 gig kingston SSD next the destination drive contains some partitions me i'll go ahead and delete those partitions there shouldn't be anything on there that I need choose whether you want to keep the data no I want to destroy that data go ahead and click Next the more choose data destroying parameters I'll just do it quickly oh who cares about this okay select the data moving method should be proportional so proportional what that does is it keeps the original yeah it scales the original partition so if I have a 320 gig and I only have a hundred gigs of data or if I'm transferring it to a new drive that's 128 gigs and I have 80 gigs of data it'll just make it instead of a 320 gig with 80 gigs of data it'll make it a 128 getting partition with 80 gigs of data so proportional is definitely the way I want to go here and then I click Next and then in theory this is gonna work really well and when I turn the camera back on I'll be showing you how I'm glued it up to my laptop with my new SSD well after a fair bit of waiting actually it looks like there's a this copy of a Cronus is a little bit different from the one that I've used in the past so you can see it compares what the partitions are gonna look like before and after cloning so go ahead and press next again so click proceed to start aha this is what I was expecting to happen when I press next last time so I'll be back shortly it is now the following morning and I have to confess I was a little surprised at how long it Cronus took to to clone the drives because the version that I normally use only takes about 20-25 minutes my gem normally using SSDs because most of the times I've done cloning is like for my for my SSD comparison or whatever else but either way here we are we can keep going with this project the whole thing probably took I mean I it was had been running for two to two and a half hours by the time I went to bed and then it was it was showing it was maybe like 40 to 50 percent done so I'm guessing the whole thing took 4 plus hours anyway we're done now so we'll go ahead and exit Acronis and then once that's exited I guess we can just open up the disk drive here and so the hope oh wait we're going to shut it down okay so we unplug the old hard drive which is in this enclosure we turn on the computer and then I'm just gonna open up the disk drive here so I make sure it doesn't boot to that and in theory it's gonna boot up to the SSD so let's see how this goes I'll let you guys have this experience with me where we find out if this worked there's my cat he's a morning person he's fighting with the twist I where he was and then I turned around so now he stops waiting up Windows XP something to bear in mind is if you're running Windows XP it's probably not ideal to use a cloning utility I mean it'll work for the time being but you're not going to get the best performance because it's quite likely that your partitions are going to be unaligned or misaligned or however that would work so I'm not going to show you guys my password if that's all the same to you but there we go so that was it it those are my Linux Linux distros
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.