Gadgetory

now in my recent tech tips video about the GX 660 R I actually mentioned that this my oven this motherboard well the motherboard of this laptop supports dual drives and it also has dual drives within the chassis so it comes by default with 640 gigs total that is 320 gigs x 2 and raid 0 but you are not by any means obligated to keep that configuration so what I'm going to be showing you guys today is I'm going to take apart the laptop and I'm going to show you how I would upgrade it either to a single boot SSD to go with one of those hard drives being left behind for storage or even if I wanted to upgrade to dual SSDs in raid 0 to replace the dual hard drives that come by default in raid 0 so the first step is gonna be to turn the laptop off which is fairly straightforward no would normally be fairly straightforward shutdown there we go so we're gonna do that before opening up the casing and we're also going to unplug the battery and unplug the power cord just to make sure that while we're taking around with the inside guts we are not potentially going to be upsetting anything you know shorting anything live so take that off there we're gonna flip this guy over here camera chest tripod it's gonna slip just awesome to unlock release get that out there's my battery ok 7800 milliamp hours in case anyone was wondering ok so yeah that's the first step actually maybe in retrospect a better first step would be to use the msi burnrecovery utility to create an OS restore disk there's a good idea for you so I yes thank you u.s. yeah I would like to burn this disk so here we go can restore your system back to default settings if you want to create a recovery disk now please follow the instructions to proceed okay click Next oh I guess I better put that in the drive and I hopefully will create a recovery disk so yeah we'll do that first so removing the hard drives from the GX 660 by the way it was a three disc process and actually took me quite a while to make the msi recovery discs that I assume I'll need I mean I have a Windows disk Andy and I could just install like a blank Windows just from scratch and then dig up all the drivers on the MSI website and all that but might be less hassle for me overall to just use the recovery disk so one of the screws from each of the drives is actually removed when you take off the back cover and then the other one has to be removed afterwards both of these drives should come out fairly easily just gonna unplug that there okay so drive number one looks like there's a little uh little tab there whatever let's just slide it see what happens you get the cab that might help there we go so two scorpio black 320 gig is out now let's find the other scorpio black 320 gig so I'm going to take out this little rubber anti vibration stopper or whatever it happens to be slide that there and there we go the second scorpion black 320 gig is out so let's see if I only wanted to install a single SSD drive and then leave one of these hard drives in as a storage drive then I would have only taken out about one of the drives but I've decided what I'm going to do is I'm gonna go with dual SSDs and raid 2-0 to replace the dual hard drives in raid 0 so here's all I have to do is just take the mounting hardware that was on the hard drive that shipped in the system by default and we are and throw that on there so now I've got one SSD ready for mounting okay so of course Air Force series SSD so which one is which are these both the same yeah it looks like both sets of mounting hardware are identical so all I have to do is swap that in there there we are so that's on just fine and dandy there I'm also gonna have to try and remember which screw goes in now and which one goes in when I replace the cover so that we are opening this up got another SSD here that we're gonna be opening for this project there we are and that up brand-spanking-new and let's get this gonna fit on here maybe I'll just stop for now you guys can come back after I flip the other driving alright so now I'm powering it on I've got the press f3 to run recovery I have recovery disk number one you can see Oh control oh shoot control delete so what I'm gonna have to do before I before I get started with the recovery or not is I'm going to have to configure the rate because these drives were configured in raid 0 so I'm going to want to configure my new dry it's in much the same manner so I'm pressing ctrl I so I'm gonna go ahead and create a raid volume I'm just gonna okay let's call it four since that's the kind of drives were using I'm gonna use all the default values so raid zero is for maximum performance although you lose some of the well I mean you lose what many would consider to be the benefit of raid which is the well that are redundant so there's nothing redundant about a raid zero in fact if either of the drives fails for whatever reason you will lose all of your data and CD boot could not find manager hmm wonder if I mislabeled that disk this one is the mystery disk I actually burned four disks throughout the course of trying to burn three and that may have accidentally just sorted these so let's see if let's just see if that figures it out I'll be back in a moment all right it's booting up now three guesses what the problem was my disks one and two were mislabeled as each other if you don't feel like guessing and this disk actually is garbage which is I thought it was back in a moment so here I am in the recovery system software so I'm just gonna click on hard disk recovery which allows me to format the whole hard drive the data will be defragment and restored to factory default settings this one says only the OS tron would be formatted okay let's go with that one cool beans okay that actually took a really long time it's um the next day now to be perfectly honest I had it running overnight so I ran all three discs through not says Windows 7 recovery successful press ok and restart the system ok so we'll find out shortly so here we are it looks like we are back to a factory fresh setting come on focus please focus focus you can focus there you go so this app will continue after restarting your computer and yeah we've got to Corsair 40 gig 4 series SSDs and they're in place of the 320 gig WD Scorpio blacks there's the raid config and so yeah well see what happens when we get to the desktop exciting actually I guess maybe we'll just stay tuned and have a look at what the boot time is like on our first boot with the Corsair force SSD raid 0 array one of the things I've noticed a lot is that people on the Internet's tend to okay well hold on okay we're not going to see it now because it's doing the performance measuring thing but that people on the Internet's tend to really exaggerate how quickly their computers boot with SSDs yeah it's faster but honestly boot time is pretty inconsequential when it comes to reasons to upgrade to an SSD so I'll get this all set up in a moment here so there we go it's back to its default configuration comes with mostly useful stuff installed things like when DVD Dobby reader comes with Norton but it's probably the only one thing that I had to uninstall from this laptop so just because I teased you guys with it before I'm gonna go ahead and show you guys a full reboot cycle with the SSD so you can see the shutdown was quite fast we're back to the BIOS already I'm actually gonna have to pull these SSDs out now that I've shown you guys how to upgrade your laptop to a dual SSD raid 0 configuration I'll be putting these drives back in for day to day use but just thought it would be kind of a neat video just to show what this laptop is capable of so there we go we are back to here once I enter the password we should be able to open up programs pretty much immediately well I haven't set up Windows Media Player yet but you can clearly see it opened up quickly so there you go SSD makes a big difference to performance thank you for checking out my 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