Samsung Series 7 Chronos NP700Z5A Disassembly Guide

Do I understand correctly that it is not necessary to remove the full back cover just to replace the HDD?

 

It is a requirement to remove the entire bottom cover.

 

Thanks for a VERY FAST reply & your unscrew warning!
Getting my 256Gb Samsung SSD today and I'll hunt for the correct driver before I'll start unscrewing away...

 

These screws are seriously evil...that or someone in Samsung's refurb department thought it would be funny to torque the bleep out of one back cover screw just to make my SSD and Intel 6230 card swap more fun. Glad I waited and did everything in one shot.

 

good work yknyong1, thanks for this guide, it's the only one in the whole web and it's awesome!
I've just bought my Chronos 7 and I want to replace the dvd drive with an SSD.
I have some questions:
1. HDD and DVD drive SATAs are II or III?
2. Should I choose an 7 mm or a 9.5 mm SSD? My first choice would be Samsung 830 256GB, my second one Crucial m4 256GB, which one would fisically fit better?
3. Can I put an 7mm SSD into an hard drive caddy for 9.5 mm DVD optical bay?
4. I saw npaladin2000 and psycho2097 successfully put an SSD into their own Chronos, can I have your opinion about that?
5. Better replace the DVD drive with the SSD or replace the HDD with the SSD and then replace the DVD drive with the HDD?

Thanks in advance.

 

1. SATA II drives shipped, but some say slot supports SATA III.
2. Doesn't matter, but SAMSUNG SSD seems better.
3. Yes.
4. Not hard to do that, go ahead.
5. Up to you, depends on your needs.

 

1. It does seem to support SATA3 based on my benchmark runs.
2. 9.5mm seems to fit just fine in the HDD bay, i didn't mess with the ODD bay.

4. It's a royal pain to get the thing open, so try to only have to do it once. That's why I just bit the bullet and bought a 512 (the OCZ was under $600 luckily).
5. I would actually replace the HDD with the SSD. If any of those slots is SATA2-only, it'd be the one by the optical drive, so that's where you want your slower drive.

 

1. I can confirm SATA3-600 with the stock tapecable (Samsung 256Gb SSD): 484 MB/sec. Used to be 102 with the 1TB HDD.
2. Same.
4. Being used to electronics tweaking I found it reasonable easy (thanks to yknyong1 for the hint with the credit card)- first screwdriver I grabbed worked perfectly with the correct pressure applied: not too much but very firmly.
5. My laptop is now faster than my already very fast PC - love it!

Read "somewhere" here that somebody bought a double decker caddy that holds two 2,5" drives - but only just.

 

Awesome. I will buy soon a Samsung 256 GB SSD and follow this disassembly guide to put it in.

What do you mean with the double hard disk thing?

EDIT: is there a thread about the software of this laptop, I have more than an issue I would like to discuss with someone who solved it or at least read something that may be able to help me.

 

Is it normal that I am getting up to 95 degrees Celsius on some of my cores while gaming (bf3, just cause 2, crysis 2) and also my gpu goes around 85 deg c. I am not holding it on my lap, leaving it steady on a clear table. My usual idle temps are all around 50 degrees c, so i am a bit concerned about why the big difference :S

 

Use the owners' lounge.

 

Very normal temperatures for the thin chassis of the Z5A.

 

I actually saw that you are active in a 100-page thread, talking about graphic card issues, about amd drivers and boot options. I would like to know if everything is solved about switchable graphic.
And at the moment I think I will need a custom solution, because nothing is working right now, I'm reading threads taken from owners' lounge. Should I open anew thread?

 

Use this thread if you are going to talk about graphics switching issues.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sam...ush-samsung-implement-fixed-mode-bios-95.html

 

then you should post your question there so other users can find the answer

 

Does this model have mSATA (mini PCI-E) slot as well, together with the regular SATA for 2.5" drives?
I'm looking to fit two drives in this laptop, if possible.
If not, are there any similar models from Samsung that have this capability?

thanks!

 

I don't think there's an SATA capable mini PCI-e slot. See this thread for an alternative way to get two storage drives.

John

 

Thank you!
I was actually looking into that last night after I posted my question here.
I will probably wait for the new Samsung laptops with Ivy Bridge CPUs before making a decision on which model to buy, they are just around the corner

 

The different from Ivy model are the CPU and GPU. The rests stay the same. About the mSATA, it has. But that is for the iSSD, which is the Express Cache. I believe it is solderd onboard too. If you want to fit to drive then replace the DVD with another drive.

 

I have bought a 9mm sata caddy to replace my dvd. Replaced the 1tb 5400 hdd with a 120gb ssd to install win7 from samsung recovery dvd. put a 500gb momentus7200 XT in sata caddy after windows installed from ssd great. both hdd and ssd work fine in windows 7. Issue is ssd is a little to high to fit where hdd was and case is a little raise on left (looks Crap)
Problem is when I swopped over ssd to 9mm caddy, my ssd drive is being recognised in bios on the first page of bios where the time is, but not being recognised in the bios boot order. still states sata cd. when I put sata cd as first boot while in ssd is in caddy, the pc doesn't bootup. screen flashes on to to off when powered up. what am i doing wrong? is there a setting in bios I need to change? iv update bios to latest from samsung with no joy. also updated ssd and hdd bios. How do I get ssd to to boot from 9mm caddy?

 

Your question has been asked long time ago. I did not remember the correct solution, but you can try to set the boot order to boot the DVD, in this case, the SSD, first.

 

the ssd is in the caddy, but the bios is not recognising the ssd in the caddy in boot order. corsair Force Series 3 ssd by the way.

 

I just recently bought a series 7 chronos and wanted to change the graphics card. What cards are compatible (1gb and up) and how do I replace it?

 

Not possible, the graphic card in this computer is soldered to the motherboard (as shown in first posts).

Of course if the graphic card fails you can replace the whole motherboard to get an identical new working one, but that's not gonna be cheap.

 

Did you disable any Fast Boot option (look in Easy Settings and the BIOS). On my Series 9 Fast Boot skips everything except the primary boot device.

John

 

Noticed that core #2 was getting hotter much faster than the others, and cooling much slower. I decided to replace the thermal compound. I found that there had been a large bubble covering about 25% of the middle of the CPU die! The thermal compound had never touched the die.

Unfortunately after replacing the thermal compound (with AS5) my full load temps are higher than they were before (85C before, with 92C on Core #2. 91C after on all cores). I am considering redoing the thermal compound and bending the heat sink tabs up a little to put more pressure on the cpu to compensate for the AS5 being pretty thin (runny). Any thoughts on this?

 

Bring it to Samsung for heatsink replacement. Do not bend the heatsink as that will be physical damage.

 

Most applications ultilize Core #2, 4 of quad-core CPU. If I were you, I will send it back to Samsung to let them service that. However, you might just open it again and apply a little bit more thermal compound to that. There might be something that does not level correctly, so that you would see much space between heatsink and CPU die. Old laptop used those thermal pad that pretty much cover the entire surface, but it is really difficult to find a good thermal pad than thermal paste, because most thermal pads come from China and they are really bad.

 

how do you remove the bezile around the screen for screen replacement?

 

Has anyone changed the optical drive module yet? Wondering if anyone has replaced it with something else like a blu ray module

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sam...isassembled-parts-analysis-6.html#post8588358

 

I just picked up a NP700Z5A-S0BUS for a good price today and I'm wondering about the above comment. I was originally planning to use a Samsung 830 128GB in the HDD bay, but I'm now considering selling my SFF (in sig) and using the Plextor M3 instead. The M3 is 9mm, so I'm wondering if I may have problems with the case being "a little raised on left", as mentioned above. Is the Hitachi HDD that comes with the system shorter than 9.5mm?

 

Can you make a guide to remove ODD? I want to replace it with another one that reads/writes blu ray

 

I no longer have the Series 7, but as long as you can get the bottom cover off you should be able to figure out which are the ODD screws to remove.

 

lol any insight on my post?

 

It is actually 9.3mm IIRC, but the caddy is for 9.5mm. If the SSD is "too large", you can strip the SSD (i.e. left PCB only) and insulate it, or alternatively, stick the SSD straight to the chassis with tape (don't use the caddy).

 

pretty big bummer to find out a regular 9.5 drive wont fit, tape seems like a pretty crappy solution, possibly bending the connectors on the motherboard or ssd? should i just use the ssd in the caddy and configure that as my main boot drive?

 

So after disassembling and re-assembling my NP700Z5C it would appear that my keyboard now has some significant flex to it, anyone know what could have caused this?

 

Hi there,

did you install a hard drive caddy to replace the dvd drive? thats the only thing i can think of that would cause more flex. The right palm rest might be a little more wobbly if you replace the 9.3 drive with a 7mm drive, leaving a bit of space between the ssd and bottom of the palm rest.

 

I have a big issue:
I just picked up a Sandisk Extreme 240gb SSD and decided to replace my HDD with it.
After successfully removing the back cover, I exchanged the drives, but when putting it back together, I found that the left is a little more raised, since the SSD is apparently thicker.
THEN I tried to remove the back again but almost completely stripped the screw that won't budge. please help!

 

Your screwdriver is wrong size. Stop using it. Find the correct size screwdriver and try again.

 

THANK GOD, I managed to remove the screw, RIGHT after I posted this.

I want to continue using my SSD, but it is raises the case. What can I do?

 

Remove the casing (may void warranty), take out the PCB and shield it.

 

How would you recommend I shield it, and how would I prevent any movement after I put the laptop back together?

 

For me I used paper to wrap the PCB with some electrical tape. As long as the metal pins do not touch any thing to make a short circuit it will be fine. No movement by taping the ssd straight to the chassis.

 

thanks! i'll give that a try when i get my hands on some electrical tape.

 

Has anyone else encountered this problem? Did you find a solution? I'm hoping to replace the ODD with an SSD but if booting from the SSD in the ODD bay is not possible, I'll swap the existing HDD to the ODD bay and put the SSD where the original HDD was.

Feedback is appreciated.

 

I want to thank yknyong1 for this excellent pictoral guide in disassembling the laptop case. I disassembled my 15.6" (I have the Best Buy model) w/o any issues and replaced the 1TB HDD with a Samsung 830 SSD 256GB. I used my micro screwdriver set to ensure I did not strip one of the small phillips head screws. Each set of screws went into a separate dixie cup so I could keep them segregated.

I used Norton Ghost which came with the drive to clone the windows system partition and then copy over the C Drive intact. I could not transfer over the hidden OEM recovery partition, so I left it on the original 1TB Seagate HDD.

Thanks again yknyong1 !!!

 

How is this working out for you? I am considering doing precisely this same thing and would probably order my 830 from Newegg at the same time I order my Series 7. How easy was the clone software? Any problems recognizing drive, etc?

 

Install was easy. Samsung magician DVD has the Ghost instructions needed to clone the SSD from your installed HDD. I used the USB adapter that came with the notebook drive kit.


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