# of Hard Drive Bays & How to Access Hard Drive Bays

Greetings,

I have two Asus laptops that I am interested in expanding the hard drive capacity of.

Chief among the two is my Asus N56VM-RB51 that I purchased last year. It is a fine machine but I find the 750 GB hard drive to be lacking and would like to upgrade to a 2 TB (or 2x 2 TB if possible), or perhaps slap an SSD in there for a boot drive.

The issue is I cannot find specs anywhere that state how many hard drive bays this particular model has, and I can only locate two screws on the under side of the machine which don't loosen up anything. Does anyone know more about this laptop's anatomy and how I might get inside?

The other laptop is an older Asus K52JE-XN1 that I picked up while I was in college. I don't use this one for much more than communication, but I still would like to know how to get into the hard drive bay in case something changes down the road. I am sure this one only has a single hard drive bay, but if someone knows differently I would be very interested in hearing what he or she had to say.

Thanks very much for your time, I do appreciate it.

 

For the N56 it appears you will need a caddy, (it has 1 hard drive bay) and it will replace the Optical drive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zcyy3zitRKs Skip to 9:30 seconds to see how to check out the present hard drive and RAM.
HDD Caddy – Add a 2nd HDD to your laptop » Asus N56 HDD Caddy SATA 2nd harddisk HDD/SSD Asus N56VM-S4050V N56VZ
IT appears that the K52 also has one bay and needs a caddy if you want a second hard drive. Asus K50 K51 K52 HDD Caddy
This will show you how to take it apart https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86ZJ0l-OcFE
And Welcome to the forum

 

Thanks for the prompt reply! As I understand it the caddy requires me to remove the optical drive, something I'll probably avoid.

Regardless, the information was helpful and I do appreciate it. Thanks for the welcome! I love your avatar too by the way

 

The only 2 TB laptop drives I know of are 15 mm, which is too big for standard laptops. They still adhere to 2.5" standards, but a 15 mm drive won't fit your Asus laptop in either the storage drive bay nor an optical caddy. You may need to stick with a 9.5 mm drive.

 

I did notice that in my shopping adventures as well, which is unfortunate but certainly doable.

Thanks for the heads up just the same

 

You should be able to fit a 1.5 TB 5400 RPM Hitachi 5K1500 in there or a 1 TB 7200 RPM Hitachi 7K1000, both drives are the standard 9.5mm thickness.

Not the N560Vm, but the chassis should be almost identical: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC_GLPNtn2I.