M17X R1 - Internal 4TB HDD plus 120GB SSD Upgrade!

Hey people, I just thought I would update you all on my most recent upgrade to my M17X R1. I managed to fit in dual 2TB HDD's for storage/games and one 120GB SSD for my OS and programs! For anyone interested in this upgrade to their M17X, I uploaded pictures of the process.

The drives I used:
- Kingfast F3 Plus 120GB SSD
- Seagate Spinpoint M9T 2TB 2.5"
- Seagate Spinpoint M9T 2TB 2.5"

These Seagate Spinpoint M9T's are the only 2TB 2.5" drives that are 9mm thick that I know of. To my understanding, you can't even buy these from stores really, only on Amazon or Ebay. However, I do know that these drives are housed inside the Seagate Backup Plus External drives, and I noticed that you can find those external drives cheaper than the actual hard drives themselves (mainly due to re-sellers).

Without further ado, here are a few pictures of the upgrade process:

Spoiler

The M17X R1 that underwent the upgrade:



One of the two original 500GB Seagate Momentus drives that I upgraded from:



The drives that went into the M17X R1 for the upgrade:



A closeup of one of the 2TB drives (front and back):




And why not just a quick unboxing of the Kingfast SSD. I never heard of this company before, mainly bought it for the price and why not try something different lol? Overall I'm happy with the drive and can recommend it, it's pretty fast, but not quite as snappy as my Sandisk Extreme SSD in my desktop - but that may be due to the beefier cpu . The SSD comes with a 3 year warranty which is nice. As you'll see in the picture though, the sticker on the SSD is not on straight, but I wont be looking at in anyways .





To reach two of the drive slots, I had to just remove the bottom cover and replace the existing dual 500GB drives with the SSD and 2TB HDD:




After those two drives were installed, I had to install the last 2TB HDD in to slot where the DVD drive used to be. I previously replaced my DVD drive with an HDD caddy a few months ago in anticipation of this upgrade :

Now the final result - a true desktop replacement with 4TB storage!

Spoiler

Picture of the drives showing up in the Bios:



A screenshot of the drives in Windows:

So far, i have not run into any issues using these drives. However, these 2TB drives do not give a speed increase over my previous 500GB drives, loading times are noticeably longer. However, for this amount of storage I am willing to sacrifice a bit of speed. This upgrade should work on any revision of the M17X or 17, so enjoy!

 

Great job, its amazing how versatile the m17x is.

Sent from my 831C using Tapatalk

 

Nicely done on that old soldier! What other sorts of mods have you made to your R1?

 

Thanks! Well, I wouldn't necessarily call them mods, more of upgrades really. When I originally got my M17X R1 it had these following specs:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2GHz
4GB Ram
1440x900 res screen
Nvidia GTX 260M SLI
Dual 500GB HDD's
DVD

Since then I have upgraded to the specs which can be found in my signature. I pretty much now have my M17X R1 maxed out to it's full potential with the R1 motherboard. The only way I can upgrade any further would be to swap my motherboard with one for the R2, and then go from there. I will not be doing that anytime soon as for what I use this laptop for (mainly JRPG's and such) it is pretty powerful enough.... and I have my desktop for my true performance needs. However, if the new MMORPG ArchAge runs like crap on this, then I may upgrade, depending on how much I will play it on my M17X.

On a side note, I have also put this M17X on a desk I built for my treadmill, which can be considered a mod I guess, I'll post updated pics of the setup soon.

 

That's a beautiful upgrade. Well done sir! :thumbsup: