Installing SSD in 5110?

I have not found a way to accomplish this. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I first removed the battery, then the memory door and memory. I then removed the optical drive and the keyboard. I unplugged all of the ribbon cables and removed the palm rest.

At this point, I was left staring at the motherboard. I first decided to flip the laptop and remove all of the screws on the bottom that were left, including the two that are covered by the rubber caps. I then flipped the machine back to normal and removed all screws that held the motherboard. I did NOT remove the two screws holding each of the screen hinges...I became a touch scared when I got to this point because I still could not get the motherboard up!

The hard drive is on the bottom of the motherboard and seems to be hanging on it somehow. It does not look to be attached to the bottom chassis plate, but instead is connected to the board, which I can not get removed.

Help?

Thanks!

 

Did you check the service manual?
Documentation

 

Thanks! This is the first I have seen it.

It looks like a complete disassembly of the entire notebook to change a hard drive. Nice.

Thanks again!

+1 rep from me!

 

I know this is an old thread, but why on earth would they make you dismantle and entire laptop to replace a HDD? I have this model too.

A HDD and memory should be (2) things easy to replace on a laptop. Terrible Dell.

 

To prevent people from upgrading the drive? It's not horribly difficult, but it will scare away people from upgrading. The way I see it, most people with Inspirons don't care about upgrading the drive.

I completely agree that having it under the motherboard is not a smart move as drive failure is by far the most failure to happen. But the older N5010 wasn't that easy either, you had to remove the keyboard, palmrest to get to the drive and it was in a rather poor position (if you bang on the palmrest you will wreck your hard drive).

Just follow the service manual and use proper ESD protection, and you should be fine.

 

I do agree that Inspiron owners are not the type to update the drive. However, I got it as a gift and wanted to put an SSD in it (it already has 8 gigs). I am not great with laptops. Its no secret to you guys the difference that makes, I just put an SSD into an old Precision with XP, it is just strait up lightening fast.

On the other hand I am a forensic guy and I never like to see a HDD in a tough spot to get to....its the only thing in the computer that I care about.

Tks for the reply.

 

Yup. Simple Rule with most "mainstream" laptops (ie: not precisions, AWs, Sagers, etc.)

Put the parts in a place that is incredibly inaccessible to the end-user, and they won't dare try to change it on their own... thus, we (company) save on tech calls, but get more $$ sending techs out to do what ultimately is a very simple task. (I should know, my mom uses an inspiron m5030 from BestBuy (bought there) and i wanna swap out the 3GB for 8GB... i have never seen such a difficult swap in my life (but it sure is doable) .

Jason