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ROGBot
Hi, I am thinking about picking up a G750JH-DB71 and I noticed that someone said that the drives used for the boot RAID 128GB+128GB SSD are proprietary and not replaceable with standard mSATA SSD's. Is this true? Has anyone replaced the original SSD drives with larger drives?
Update: It turns out that the SSD drives in the JH are special interfaces, not mSATA. The closest name I can find that differentiates them is "M.2 NGFF SATA" or "M.2 SATA".
At one point it looked like A110 or X110 might be the unique name, but that is a more generic name for SanDisk SSD's, and includes 2.5" drives.
Recently I tried to purchase the 256GB version of the M.2 SSD, but no luck. And, with all the confusion about the form factor, the retail components place called and ordered what they thought was the right component and were shipped 2.5" 256GB SanDisk drives, I don't feel comfortable ordering off of Ebay - there are some listings that look correct.
The M.2 is longer and narrower than the mSATA boards, and the M.2 has a distinctively different socket/fingers layout.
Here is the original page + a photo of the M.2 NGFF on the left, and typical mSATA boards on the right:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6575/hands-on-with-plextors-ngff-ssds
Wikipedia entry for M.2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2
Update: It turns out that the SSD drives in the JH are special interfaces, not mSATA. The closest name I can find that differentiates them is "M.2 NGFF SATA" or "M.2 SATA".
At one point it looked like A110 or X110 might be the unique name, but that is a more generic name for SanDisk SSD's, and includes 2.5" drives.
Recently I tried to purchase the 256GB version of the M.2 SSD, but no luck. And, with all the confusion about the form factor, the retail components place called and ordered what they thought was the right component and were shipped 2.5" 256GB SanDisk drives, I don't feel comfortable ordering off of Ebay - there are some listings that look correct.
The M.2 is longer and narrower than the mSATA boards, and the M.2 has a distinctively different socket/fingers layout.
Here is the original page + a photo of the M.2 NGFF on the left, and typical mSATA boards on the right:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6575/hands-on-with-plextors-ngff-ssds
Wikipedia entry for M.2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2
Howdy Guys,
Been reading up on this thread and*enjoying all the team work here. I also have the g750JHA and was wanting to upgrade the two 128's and possibly the 1tb mech drive to ssd. Just need to save my pennies a bit longer. Again thanks for all the work done.
Have a merry Christmas and Happy ROG_n
Doug
Been reading up on this thread and*enjoying all the team work here. I also have the g750JHA and was wanting to upgrade the two 128's and possibly the 1tb mech drive to ssd. Just need to save my pennies a bit longer. Again thanks for all the work done.
Have a merry Christmas and Happy ROG_n
Doug
OK, to review, my G750JH-DB71 came with a 256 GB SSD C Drive and a 1 TB 7200 rpm hard drive. The SSD was 2x128 GB M.2 SATA modules set up in RAID 0. These were 2 SanDisk SD6SP1M-128G-1002 modules. They look like this:
The SSD is my system drive, which contains my Win 8.1 Pro installation, and it was getting tight on free space (only about 15% free), so I needed to increase the size of that drive.
I used EaseUS Partition Master (free version) to examine the partitions on the original SSD:
NOTE that my 1 TB drive is DISK 0 and the C Drive is DISK 1 (listed as DISK 1 and DISK 2 in EaseUS). This seems unusual, but there it is ...
I bought 2x256 GB Transcend M.2 SSDs from Amazon for $107 each: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KLTPT6A/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_3?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=B00KLTPUG4
Obviously, I had to be cautious because the drive being replaced is my SYSTEM drive! So I used NovaBACKUP to make an image backup of the C Drive and to create a bootable image restore USB stick. (I use NovaBACKUP for my regular backups)
I tried to use the free MiniTool Partition Wizard to make a bootable partition editor CD, but I could not get my machine to start the partition editor after rebooting the CD. So, I paid for the upgrade of EaseUS (the free version won't make a bootable CD) and made a bootable CD that would run their partition manager. There is probably another free utility out there to do this but I wanted to get this DONE!
So I swapped in the new SSD modules - they just popped right in! I then booted to the BIOS screen (actually the UEFI screen) and configure the 2 new SSD modules in RAID 0. Then I booted the partition editor CD. The new disk was there All I had to do was to convert the disk to a GPT volume (as opposed to an MBR volume, which seems to be the default).
After that I booted the image restore USB and did an image restore to the new disk.
Then the machine just booted Windows from the new drive ... just like that!!
Of course the partitions were the same as the original SSD, so my new C drive was the same size (256 GB) as the old one and there was a bunch of unallocated space on the new drive. I used the EaseUS partition editor to allocate that space to the system partition. To do that, I had to first move partitions around a bit so that the unallocated space was adjacent to the system partition. Then I just expanded the system partition.
My C Drive now has 249 GB free (55% free) ! 😄
I love it when a plan comes together!
OK ... the above is the short version. I actually made a number of mistakes along the way, and had to learn what to do by trial and error. The saving grace is that I could keep swapping the original SSD back in so I could boot and google more research! I skipped all that and just wrote up the summary of what actually needs to be done to work right.
I hope this helps someone!
Happy Holidays to all!
The SSD is my system drive, which contains my Win 8.1 Pro installation, and it was getting tight on free space (only about 15% free), so I needed to increase the size of that drive.
I used EaseUS Partition Master (free version) to examine the partitions on the original SSD:
NOTE that my 1 TB drive is DISK 0 and the C Drive is DISK 1 (listed as DISK 1 and DISK 2 in EaseUS). This seems unusual, but there it is ...
I bought 2x256 GB Transcend M.2 SSDs from Amazon for $107 each: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KLTPT6A/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_3?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=B00KLTPUG4
Obviously, I had to be cautious because the drive being replaced is my SYSTEM drive! So I used NovaBACKUP to make an image backup of the C Drive and to create a bootable image restore USB stick. (I use NovaBACKUP for my regular backups)
I tried to use the free MiniTool Partition Wizard to make a bootable partition editor CD, but I could not get my machine to start the partition editor after rebooting the CD. So, I paid for the upgrade of EaseUS (the free version won't make a bootable CD) and made a bootable CD that would run their partition manager. There is probably another free utility out there to do this but I wanted to get this DONE!
So I swapped in the new SSD modules - they just popped right in! I then booted to the BIOS screen (actually the UEFI screen) and configure the 2 new SSD modules in RAID 0. Then I booted the partition editor CD. The new disk was there All I had to do was to convert the disk to a GPT volume (as opposed to an MBR volume, which seems to be the default).
After that I booted the image restore USB and did an image restore to the new disk.
Then the machine just booted Windows from the new drive ... just like that!!
Of course the partitions were the same as the original SSD, so my new C drive was the same size (256 GB) as the old one and there was a bunch of unallocated space on the new drive. I used the EaseUS partition editor to allocate that space to the system partition. To do that, I had to first move partitions around a bit so that the unallocated space was adjacent to the system partition. Then I just expanded the system partition.
My C Drive now has 249 GB free (55% free) ! 😄
I love it when a plan comes together!
OK ... the above is the short version. I actually made a number of mistakes along the way, and had to learn what to do by trial and error. The saving grace is that I could keep swapping the original SSD back in so I could boot and google more research! I skipped all that and just wrote up the summary of what actually needs to be done to work right.
I hope this helps someone!
Happy Holidays to all!
