-: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to upgrade
the storage in your laptop.
Now, in your laptop,
you're either going to be using a solid-state device
or a hard disk drive.
In this particular laptop, they actually use both.
They use a solid-state device right here, which is used
for the main operating system and applications.
Also, for additional data capacity,
they also include a regular hard disk drive right here.
Now, you'll notice that the SDD is much smaller in size
and has no moving parts.
In addition to that,
it's using a PCIe Gen 3x2 adapter,
which looks like a mini PCIe slot,
so you may mistake this for a Wi-Fi card
or a cellular modem instead of an SSD.
So it's important to read the label on the device here,
as well as checking your manual to ensure you know
what part that you're working on
as you're upgrading your system.
In this particular case, this SSD is a 512 gigabyte SSD,
and this hard drive is actually a one terabyte drive,
made by Seagate,
it's part of the BarraCuda line of products,
and it operates at 7,200 RPMs,
which gives us a pretty fast speed
for a traditional hard drive.
But our SSD will be much faster,
which is why we want to use that primarily
for our operating system and applications
and leave the regular hard drive
for all of our large data and video files.
First, we're going to replace the SSD.
Now, replacing the SSD is a lot like replacing
an expansion card.
So you're simply going to take that screw and take it out.
And once you take that screw out,
you're going to notice that this SSD is going to pop-up
almost to a 45 degree angle just like that.
Once that happens, you'll simply grab it from the sides
and pull it out.
Once you do that, you'll have your new SSD right here.
Now notice, this SSD is much smaller
than using an M.2 form factor.
If you're using an M.2 form factor,
it's going to be about two to three times as long
but about the same width,
and it uses a very similar pin-out at the bottom.
The big difference is the way it is keyed.
Now I'm going to put this here so we can zoom in.
Now you may notice we actually have two keyed holes
inside of this SSD.
This is because we're not using a mini PCIe,
but instead we're using a PCIe Gen 3x2 slot.
These are made specifically for you
to be able to use them with SSDs,
but it is a slower speed slot
than using a dedicated M.2 slot
like you'll see in most newer
and modern laptops and desktops.
All right, to put this back in,
we'll simply slide it into place,
making sure the keying is aligned properly.
And then we'll take our screw,
we'll push down the SSD,
line up the holes,
and then use the screw to hold it into place
so it doesn't move on us anymore.
And at this point, your SSD has been replaced
or upgraded with the newer model.
Now, it's important to remember
that if you're replacing your SSD,
all the data that was on the old SSD is no longer
on the new SSD.
So before you do this, you'd want to make sure you do a backup
of the contents from your old SSD to an external device
like a USB hard drive,
be able to install your new SSD,
and then put that data back from the USB hard drive
to that new SSD.
Now, in addition to that,
I'm also going to show you how to do a hard drive install
or upgrade on your laptop.
You'll notice right next to our SSD is our hard disk drive,
and this is our Seagate BarraCuda, one terabyte,
7,200 RPM hard disk drive,
and it's actually operating using a SATA connection.
On these drives,
you'll notice that it is one large port cluster
that contains both SATA data and SATA power,
but this is the exact same 7-pin and 15-pin SATA connectors
that you would use in a traditional desktop.
In fact, I could take this hard drive out of this laptop,
put it into my desktop, and it would work just fine.
It just would be a really small form factor
for that larger desktop model.
To take this out,
first, we're going to identify where the screws are.
And in this case, I have a screw here, here, here, and here.
So now that we've identified where the four screws are,
I'm going to take them out,
and that way, we can remove this hard drive.
And again, these screws tend to be small,
so if you have larger hands,
you may need to use a pair of tweezers
to be able to grab them and put them to the side like I am.
We'll take the second one out here.
So it's a little harder to get to based on its location.
There we go.
And then we're going to take the third one out here.
There we go.
And then we'll have the fourth one out here.
Okay, now that we have all four screws out,
this hard drive will freely move around,
but it is still connected using that SATA connector.
So as I pull this forward,
you'll notice that I have this SATA connector going
to this really small pin here.
And this is known as a ZIF.
Now a ZIF is a zero insertion force connector.
Now you've heard about ZIF before
when we talked about a processor socket,
and this is actually a different type of ZIF socket.
This ZIF socket is using a small ribbon cable
that's going to be basically placed
right into the side of that,
and on the other side,
it's connecting to the SATA connector.
If I flip over this hard drive,
we can get a better look at it.
And you'll notice that it's going from this ribbon cable
to that ZIF socket.
This is still, though, a SATA hard drive.
So if I pull this out,
we will notice that we can see the two SATA pieces.
We have the 7-pin SATA data connector
and the 15-pin SATA power cable.
The only difference is,
we're now using this adapter
to go from the traditional SATA hard disk drive
that we have in our laptop
that'll work with any laptop into this adapter.
And this adapter has the 15-pin SATA power connector
and the 7-pin SATA data connector going in
through this ribbon cable to that ZIF socket
on this motherboard.
Now, in addition to being able to use
any SATA hard drive as part of this upgrade,
we also are going to have to take that hard drive out
and put it into this little mounting bracket,
which is specific to this model of motherboard.
You'll notice here, we have two screws on this side
and two screws on this side.
And once you get those screws taken out,
you can simply pop this hard drive out.
And once you've done that,
you now have two pieces, the caddy and the hard drive.
This hard drive is a traditional hard drive
that is one terabyte in size,
so I can replace it with the same model and same make
or I can go larger and get myself a two terabyte,
four terabyte, or eight terabyte hard drive if I wanted to.
Once I get my new hard drive,
I can then take it and I could place it into the caddy,
screwing it in with the four screws on each side
and the four screws to secure it back into the case.
Notice this caddy is simply made up
with this little metal bracket going around all three sides.
And then on the bottom,
there is basically a sheet of plastic
with a little bit of foam.
And this is to be able to give us
a little bit better sound absorption and shock absorption
because of the moving and mechanical parts
inside of this hard drive.
So let's go ahead and install this hard drive
back into the caddy.
Now that we have all four screws placed
in that hard drive back into the caddy,
we could take that hard drive
and place it back into this case.
Before we do that,
we do want to make sure we connect our connector,
and going back, we want to make sure our 15-pin
and our 15-pin align
and our 7-pin and our 7-pin align.
And at this point,
we will just go ahead and push that into place,
we will line up all of our holes,
and then we're going to screw them into place as well.
All right, now that we've gotten all four screws in place,
the connector properly secured,
and the ZIF connector is still connected to our motherboard,
this hard drive is ready to be used.
At this point, we would reassemble the laptop,
turn the computer back on,
and then we would be able to configure that hard disk drive
for future use.
We would do that by formatting this hard drive
and then restoring any data we had.
And once again, just like the SSD,
we want to make sure we do a full backup of this hard drive
before we do the upgrade in the system.
That way, we still have access to all the data on it
once we bring the system back up.
Now, unlike the SSD,
it is a lot easier to get data off of your hard drive
once you're done doing this repair.
And the reason is,
these hard drives are using a standard SATA connector
so you can just get an external hard drive enclosure,
hook up this hard drive in that external enclosure,
which will convert that SATA into something like a USB 3
that you can plug into the side of your laptop,
recognize it as a secondary drive,
and then copy your files off that way as well.
Keep these things in mind as you're doing your upgrades.
It's always important to do a good backup of these SSDs
and hard disk drives
before you do any kind of install or upgrade
because you don't want to have a risk of losing
any of the valuable data
from your end user or your customers.