I was going to call this an upgraded HDD, but that’s not right. Technically it’s a drive update, but really it’s an SSD upgrade.

My new Portege Z30 came with a 128GB drive. I could have had Toshiba upgrade it, but it was more expensive than the deal I got before Christmas. Instead of Toshiba’s $400 for a 512GB upgrade, I paid $220 for a 512GB mSATA drive, and I also will have the 128GB one that came with the machine as a spare.

I decided to upgrade the drives this weekend and was surprised how easy this actually was. I probably need to wipe the existing OS and reinstall a cleaner version of Win8.1, but for now I wanted to duplicate things.

After powering on the machine and getting things setup (Which was easy, having my old settings of my Lenovo T430 pulled from OneDrive during setup), I needed to clone the drive. There are ways of doing this, but I settled on using the Macrium Reflect method from this MaxiumumPC article.

I downloaded Macrium Reflect and installed it. It’s a simple GUI and connecting my new MSata drive in the external enclosure, I set things duplicating while I went off to watch my daughter’s volleyball tournament.

The next day, I fell in love with YouTube and the community again. I found this teardown video that shows how easy it is to open up the Toshiba and get at the memory and drive. This is a slightly older model, and I didn’t need to the TORX screwdriver, but it was good to see someone show me without fumbling around or digging through poorly written documentation.

This morning I started making coffee. I have a BUNN maker that brews a pot in about 5 minutes from start to finish, and it’s hot. I turned that on and then broke out a screwdriver. I didn’t take pictures, but it took me about the same amount of time as the coffeemaker to get done.

I removed all the screws. I had one false start when the bottom didn’t lift up. I had missed two screws under the rear rubber feet, so I had to pry those off and remove the screws. I also needed a set of pliers to help turn one of the screws holding the drive in. This includes swapping the drives in my external case.

I screwed things together and booted up the machine and it looked exactly like it had with the 500GB drive as it had with the 128GB one.

Now to clean the OS and build things the way I want them.

Filed under: Blog Tagged: hardware, syndicated