02Jan MSI GS60 Ghost pro 4k Hard drive upgrade
I finally had a chance to sit down and film the M.2 hard drive upgrade on the MSI GS60 editing laptop I picked up. The total tear down and reassembly time was a little less then an hour and I only ended up with one extra screw (no idea where that goes). The most nerve wrecking part is detaching the motherboard to get to the second M.2 drive slot, everything else is pretty straight forward.
Before you get started on this, make sure you create a USB recovery drive! The MSI GS60 does not come with a physical copy of windows, MSI includes an easy to use tool for this, but the recovery files are stored on the 1 TB drive. If you remove it before you create a disk, you’re going to have a tough time restoring windows on the new hard drive.
You can find the screwdriver set I used here, it’s cheap but effective. If you mess up any of the tape holding the ribbon cables, you can find it here. Also this upgrade is not for the faint of heart, if you aren’t comfortable with digging into the guts of your brand new $2000 laptop, you might want to look at some of the already upgraded units on Amazon.
The original Toshiba M.2 SSD has some pretty decent numbers, and the Crucial 512GB SSD isn’t far behind with writes only trailing slightly. The Samsung 840 EVO falls right in line with the rest of the drives, just make sure you run the you run the Samsung restoration and firmware update tool and you should be good to go.
Now that I have the MSI GS60 upgraded it might be time for some rendering test. I have a titan, the R9 290x, and a GTX 680 in the studio, I’ll post some 4k rendering results next week. It’ll be interesting to see how the GS60 stacks up.
March 19th, 2015 at 9:24 pm
Hi I just purchased a new Evo 500gb ssd and a msi gs60 970m.
I haven’t started the computer yet but I want to immediately replace the 1tb hdd with the ssd.
Besides just swapping the drives is there anything I need to do?
Could you please tell me step by step guide?
March 31st, 2015 at 7:23 am
Nice video! I’m very seriously about to get an MSI Ghost but I’m still deciding on 4k 3k or 2k. I do game sometimes and the 48hz on the 4k sucks for gaming. 3K would then be 2nd choice but that doesn’t scale to 1080 for gaming as well as 4k does. So that means 2k but I won’t get 4k for graphic design.
June 21st, 2015 at 2:06 am
Thanks very much for an excellent video. I agree that the M.2 SSD drive that comes with the system is too small.
I have 2 questions. I noticed in the video that you added the Crucial 512Gb SSD to the 2nd slot, leaving the SSD that shipped with the system in the 1st. Does that mean that the c: drive size was increased by 512Gb for a total size of 649Gb (128+512)and was any post installation changes required for the system to recognize the additional 512Gb?
June 24th, 2015 at 1:57 pm
The answer is that with two M.2 SSD’s of different sizes mounted the total size of the combine drive is 2x the size of the smallest one. From the example above it would be 256Gb minus overhead, approx 238Gb. This is because using both slots require a RAID0 configuration.
If the smaller M.2 SSD is removed and the larger M.@SSD replaces it, then we get the full size of the larger one and no adjustment is needed to the configuration setup. But now the OS would need to be recovered to the new M.2 SSD.
August 6th, 2015 at 11:46 pm
Is it necessary to have a raid setup?
Or, can I just use he second sad as just a storage drive.
For example : original ssd- operating system
New m.2 sad : storage (install apps)
Hard disk : store random files
August 11th, 2015 at 7:06 am
You’ll be fine without raid.
August 11th, 2015 at 7:18 am
If you are planning to have 2 m.2 installed they must be installed as raid (unless you have a different bios to the one I have). Note the size constraints above. I just want to save you the effort of opening the laptop case twice like I had to do.
August 14th, 2015 at 9:22 pm
Hi Bob,
You seem to be very knowledgeable with this.I recently purchased a GS60 (non 4k) I’m hoping that regardless of the resolution, there are still 2 m.2 slots. Is this the case? I have a samsung 850 Evo I’d like to put in.
Also, given that is the case, when I successfully put the drive in, is setting it up a relatively painless process? Do I lose whats on the drive that came with the machine when I set up the raid?
From the looks of this, putting a 250 GB SSD in Raid 0 with a 120SSD will result in ~240 GB. Is there any benefit to this, or would it have been wiser of me to get a 120GB SSD as the extra? Did I just lose ~120GB, or is there any benefit to the mismatched drives?
Sorry for all of the questions.
Thank you for your time and help, I greatly appreciate it.
August 19th, 2015 at 4:21 pm
I am not that knowledgable just that Ihave done the upgrade b4, learned from it and trying to give back.
1. “there are still 2 m.2 slots. Is this the case?” — I am not familiar with the non-4k version but the MSI spec will tell if there are 2 slots. I also installed the Samsung 850 Evo.
2. “Also, given that is the case, when I successfully put the drive in, is setting it up a relatively painless process?” — Yes, the instruction provided is very accurate and detailed. I had upgraded desktops b4 but this was the fist time I upgraded a laptop. You need to have some prior knowledge about this type of tasks.
3. “Do I lose whats on the drive that came with the machine when I set up the raid?” — Yes. I would suggest, no, it is necessary that you follow MSI instructions for making a recovery thumb drive so you can recover the image. Both process are relatively painless. Here is the video link https://youtu.be/ArvWkGG_yu8 or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArvWkGG_yu8&feature=youtu.be
4. “From the looks of this, putting a 250 GB SSD in Raid 0 with a 120SSD will result in ~240 GB. Is there any benefit to this, or would it have been wiser of me to get a 120GB SSD as the extra? Did I just lose ~120GB, or is there any benefit to the mismatched drives?” — If you put the 120 GB with the 250 gb you will end up with 240 GB. I don’t believe there is any benefit to this, you will lose 130 GB. I had the similar situation, I bought the 500 GB EVO, so now I have the original 128 GB SSD lying around (any takers).
Good luck and all the BEST…