Series 9 Owners: Third party mSATA upgrades

Kingston say either 4GB non-removable or 4GB non-removable and one slot.

Everyone so far with an X3B/X3C/X3D has got the 4GB non-removable (it's a DIPP module). Perhaps Samsung are waiting for Kingston to show them where it's possible to fit in an SODIMM slot.

John

 

Thanks ... I didn't want to upset you. It's just hard to believe for a Samsung newbie, that they don't offer it.
I'll have to live with it, I will test my virtual machine with different Memory settings to find an acceptable config ...
But after decades of Vaio's I really enjoy the new feeling ;-)

 

Which SSD have you got? If it's the Sandisk U100 then start reading the rest of this thread. The U100 will choke on the disk access if your virtual machine starts to cause the virtual memory to be used.

John

 

I am a bit confused. Does Samsung Series 9 has Sata 3 or Sata 2? I saw in several website that it is Sata 2.

 

You won't achieve the speeds I reported in my Crucial m4 mSATA review (tested in my X4C) with SATA 2. And speeds in my older X3B are well above the SATA 3 threshold. So don't lose sleep over this matter.

John

 

That is cool. I will now sleep:thumbsup:

 

Unfortunately, I experienced this already ... Seems to lock up for a minute or two from time to time when working with the Virtual Machine

If I will not find a way, to run it smoothly, I'll kill the VM on the Ultrabook and install the apps in the traditional way

 

That will only bypass the U100 bottleneck if your overall RAM usage means that virtual memory access is minimal.

John

 

I pulled the U100 out of mine nearly immediately. I have the Crucial M4 256GB mSATA in my NP900X3D.

 

look at this baller ! what did the ivy 900x3d cost ya?

 

i posted this also in 900x3c thread, but for at least today newegg.com has the crucial drive for USD 169.99. just ordered one and will try to follow the swapping instructions posted by several people in this thread.

 

I finally was able to image my old drive to the new 256 Crucial M4. Acronis True Image 2013 is NOT self explanatory, and I didn't find step-by-step instructions on this thread. This link gave a great overview, though. Just be sure to restore the partitions one at a time (with the MBR being last). Also, check the box for disk signature (without it, new drive won't boot). Make sure to "Add Disk" in order to initialize the new 256 drive before getting started with any steps on Acronis:

Page Start

 

Mushkin Pushes The Envelope On Flash Storage For Ultrabooks With New 480GB mSATA Solid State Drive | TechCrunch

This should work with a series 9, shouldnt it?

 

I can't see why not - it's mSATA. Perhaps this will encourage Micron / Crucial to release their 512GB m4 mSATA that was mentioned months ago. Their pricing tends to be more competitive.

John

 

So i swapped out the 128gb SSD for the crucial 256gb SDD following the mechanical guidance on this thread.

mechanically, it went fine -- it was physically easy to switch the SSD. however, i did not make an image of anything in advance and did not use samsung recovery -- i just used the windows recovery disk that came with the computer. my fault for not reading the thread carefully enough.

but at this point, i could use some help from the community. i installed most of the drivers from the samsung website using the SW program from samsung, so most things appear to be working fine. but i'm unsure yet whether Intel Rapid Start Techology (IRST) is working properly. i'll save questions about that for the other thread on that topic (although the prospect of doing a bunch of stuff in the command line is intimidating for a novice like me).

my question here is how to create a partition at this point so i can use samsung recovery. i know that several posters don't see the point to samsung recovery if you backup some other way, but i would still like to add it. is is possible to create a partition at this point so i can install samsung recovery? the installer won't let me install samsung recovery, probably becuase the new crucial SSD is not partitioned.

thanks in advance.

 

i should add that i of course still have the sandisk 128gb SSD so i guess i could wipe out the crucial one and start over, but i would rather not do that because i already installed microsoft office. and i actually don't know how to wipe out what is on the crucial SSD anyway even if i did decide to redo everything...

 

Elsewhere in this forum there are instructions from Dannemand about how to create a bootable USB admin tool when in recovery mode (which means you need to put back the U100 to do this) and once you have the tool you can create the recovery partition on the new SSD. I doubt that you need to wipe the SSD.

John

 

thanks, john. will read through that.

 

I plan to do a clean install of windows8, but I couldn't find the key of my current windows. Someone mentioned it's located on the charger but I don't find it.

 

I bought the m4 drive and am trying to install windows on it. It doesn't sound like anyone here had an issue in doing this but what I am experiencing is that windows cannot make the m4 a system partition and I believe this is because the USB drive I am installing windows from is being assigned as a C: drive and windows will only let you install windows on a C: drive?

Anyone have any ideas on how I can get this installed?!

Thanks!

 

I bought this m4 msata drive. I cloned U100 to the new drive and tried to shrink C drive but windows refused to do so by saying due to some unmovable files. So I went ahead using Easeus. After partitioning, the m4 became unaccessible. I first thought the drive is defective. I RMA that one and got a new drive. I tried Acronis clone and resize, it asked for reboot. After the reboot, I can no longer read my m4, again! Did I do anything wrong? Even I forced it to partition, it shouldn't fail on me to totally unreadable, right?

Another bizarre thing is after the Acronis reboot, the ultrabook displays "Secure Boot: Image failed to verify with *ACCESS DENIED*" at the beginning of restart. That means, I can NOT access my bios by pressing F2 if I want to turn off Secure Boot. Very frustrated after fighting with the S9 for the past week...

*UPDATE*, the booting error message has been removed by recovering to the factory image. But I still can't access bios by hitting F2. Any clue?

 

Sounds like your machine came with Windows 8 and secure boot was enabled. The key for Windows 8 is embedded in the CSM BIOS/UEFI implementation. Secure boot should be disabled before cloning the drive.

 

Yes it came with win8, which I feel like totally unnecessary for an ultrabook without touchscreen. Is that the same reason my m4 failed again and again?

 

Did you make sure that the original SSD was disconnected before restarting the computer?

Did your cloning include the drive signature?

John

 

Thanks for the reply, John. I did disconnect the U100 before restarting the laptop. I don't remember cloning with drive signature though. I just RMA the drive and will stop trying with partitioning after cloning. I'll give it a fresh install of Win7. I really don't like win8 anyway.

The bois problem has been solved by updating bois (Thanks John again for the info from another post).

 

FYI,

After adding Start8 to my Windows 8 installation, I am much happier. Best $4.99 I ever spent.

 

I had a strange problem with my series 9. I had replaced the 128 GB Sandisk SSD with the 256 GB Crucial drive, by cloning the 128 GB drive to the 256 GB, and then expanding the drive, etc. and everything was working fine for several weeks. Then a couple of days ago, while I was doing some file renaming of photos in the photo directory, the laptop just froze up. I couldn't move the cursor, or anything else. Couldn't even shut it down other than by holding the power button down for several seconds. Then the laptop wouldn't boot up into windows. It just would go into the setup screen where I could set BIOS functions, but wouldn't go past that point when I loaded default settings and saved them. It would just come back up to that same setup. I tried pressing the little button in the hole in the back of the unit, etc. but no luck.

Finally I cracked the unit back open, and inserted the original Sandisk SSD, and it booted up. Then I connected the Crucial drive to my main PC using a MSATA to USB adapter, and it said that there were errors on the drive, and I should let it try to do repairs - which I proceeded to do. That process was successful, and I was able to access the drive through the USB interface to my main PC, and I copied files that I didn't want to loose. Then I replaced the Crucial drive back into the Series 9, and it booted up properly.

I'm wondering what I should do at this point. I don't really want to close the laptop back up if the drive is going to give me a problem in the next day or so, but I also don't want to go back to the 128 GB drive long term. Any suggestions?

 

Did you mean the Sandisk or the m4?

It is possible that there was just some random corruption which won't repeat. However, you are probably not running the latest firmware which you can get from Crucial.
Version 04MH (released 04 Dec 12) includes the following changes:

Backup your system first (which you've just done) and you might need to use the battery reset facility to get the computer restarted after the update.

John

PS: I've now updated my m4 to 04MH. It went smoothly. Just accept the licence then sit back and watch and ignore all the prompts on the screen - it doesn't want any user input even though it asks for some.

 

John,

Thanks for the response. Yes, I meant to say that I had then put the Crucial drive back into the system.

This morning I updated the Crucial firmware to the 04MH version without any issues, and so hope that will solve the problem.

 

I updated my 256GB M4 to the 04MH firmware release today as well. I hope it resolves the total power off issue I have seen a few times on my machine. We'll see.

For a little more background, I have seen my machine choke and literally power off. It's interesting because the next boot of Windows doesn't show any errors. HWiNFO64 does indicate the drive power off failure.

If I see any more, I will be contacting Crucial for a replacement.

 

Crucial's firmware upgrade process is a picnic compared with that for the MyDigitalSSD BP3 (as mentioned in my first post in this thread). The BP3 firmware update has its own manual (to be followed carefully to stand a chance of the upgrade working) and is guaranteed to wipe the SSD. It took me several attempts to get the upgrade to work (via the WinPE route). Connecting the SSD as a slave to another computer didn't work for me. Fortunately, I had Acronis TrueImage available to make a full image of the SSD which I restored after the firmware upgrade using a bootable flash drive that is one of the TrueImage options.

John

 

Here's a followup to this post on 12/23. After applying the firmware update, I have not seen any issues (knock on wood) with the SSD. I hope it lives a long a fruitful life in my NP900X3D-A02US.

 

Hi All,

Iam new to this site but have found some very useful information. I also have a Samsung S9 13" model with the 128gb sdd. I have just purchased a 256gb M4 as recommended by this thread. BUT have a problem I cannot get round and hopefully you can help? I have cloned my 128gb ssd currently in the laptop to a extenral hdd using Macrium reflect and have also created a bootable usb.

My question is how after I install the new blank 256gb ssd into the laptop do I get the cloned data from the external hdd to it?

Thanks in advance for you time and help.

 

Did you boot Macrium Reflect and attempt a restore? See Restore Disks and Partitions

 

Hi. I was hoping someone might help me out regarding changing the msata in my Samsung Series 9 NP900X3C-A02SE notebook. Seeing as it comes with one of the slowest msata on the marked (Sandisk U100) I am planing to replace it with A-DATA SX300 128GBSSD MSATA/600 witch is suppose to be a much better one. I just bought the notebook and it comes with windows 8 pre-installed but with no cd/usb installation. So after i replace the msata, obviously there wont be windows 8 installed on the new msata and i wont have the windows 8 on a usb stick/cd. Seeing as I wont have anything else on the old msata disk I dont see the need for messing around with cloning and such (witch I dont have the software, hardware or idea how to pull of) but just to a clean new installion of windows 8. Any pointers on how to get the windows 8 installion on to a usb stick when I dont have windows 8 anywhere else than on the old msata? I've done a install of windows 7 on an older notebook so I know how to do the whole iso-usb process, but that time I had windows 7 on a DVD.. And is there anything else I need to think about after replacing the msata other than having a windows 8-boot disk install ready? Any feedback will be greatly apriciated!

 

I've no hands-on experience with Windows 8 but did the notebook come with Samsung Recovery Solution and, if it does, does SRS include a facility for creating backup installation discs for Windows, drivers and software. If not, use SW Update to create backups of the drivers and Samsung software and see this thread for Windows 8 installers.

John

 

This is interesting from Micron/Crucial.

 

My 256 GB Crucial M4 recently died. It had worked fine in my X3C for the last 4 or 5 months but I started getting lots of random blue screens of death. I tried a fresh Win7 install, firmware update, etc. Nothing worked. I finally gave up and switched back to my original u100 and no more problems. The RMA was a piece of cake with Crucial support and I should be getting my replacement in the next few days. Just in case anybody else starts getting a lot of random BSODs, it might be your SSD.

 

Thanks. I've been waiting for news about bigger mSATA SSDs. It appears we have to wait for Q2.

Bad news and good news. I must do backup images more regularly. Did you ever update the firmware since getting the SSD? My X3B had a BSOD today, but it's got the MyDigitalSSD BP3 inside.

John

 

I had not updated the firmware until about 2 weeks ago after calling Crucial support for the first time. They also asked me to leave it in idle for 12 hours hoping that some sort of self-repair in the firmware would fix potential TRIM errors. I have an external mSATA > 2.5" USB enclosure, so I just plugged it into my desktop pc and let it sit for 24 hours. I then reloaded a fresh Win7 image again and continued to get random BSOD problems. Sometimes it would go days without a BSOD and other days I'd get 10 of them.

They also recommended updating my Chipset drivers and my SATA controller drivers thinking it might be some sort of TRIM control problem. None of those things made a difference so they just had me send it back for a replacement. I was impressed with Crucial's support. They weren't robots reading from a script and actually listened and acknowledged the troubleshooting steps I had already taken.

 

Hi all,

I'm hoping someone here might be able to help me because I've got myself into a bit of a bind.

I bought a new NP900X3C-A05UK from Amazon along with a 256GB Crucial mSATA SSD. This laptop actually came with a Lite-On drive and not the U100 others have mentioned but I'd like to replace it anyway to get more space.
The laptop has Windows 8 with UEFI enabled and I already updated to the latest BIOS. I'd like to dual boot with a Linux distro, probably Ubuntu.

I purchased Acronis to clone the existing hard-drive. I disabled secure boot, fast boot and disabled UEFI in bios. However, if I set the bios to CSM only, the Windows installation will not boot (to be able to use Acronis), so I set it to UEFI + CSM OS. I booted back into Windows and tried to run Acronis. When it rebooted, Acronis got stuck while loading, I tried it a few times and it seems to be a problem with UEFI.

The big problem now is that after this happened I cannot open the BIOS settings using F2 at boot, it just does nothing when I press/hold F2 and boots into Windows. I could access recovery by F4 so I thought I'd give that a try, but it doesn't restore BIOS, only Windows.

I've tried both disconecting the SSD and booting and connecting the new (still blank) Crucial drive, but I still can't access BIOS via F2.
I've also tried running a live usb of Ubuntu secure remix but this kernel panics (most probably UEFI again?).

So at this point, I can't get into BIOS, I can't run/install Ubuntu and I can't clone the drive. I can't even just install Ubuntu on the new drive and I'm a bit stuck!
Any ideas are much appreciated,
Thanks.

 

I have found that cloning the existing partition from the original mSATA SSD wasn't the best option - I just did a clean install on the new drive (256gb m4) but prior to that, I made sure I had save all the drivers/softwares that came along the original install (with Samsung Recovery)

There's nothing worthy in the Samsung installation in addition.

 

Is Windows is installed in a UEFI environment, it won't run correctly if you flip CSM BIOS. The only time you should do that is when you have a new blank drive and are ready to install a new installation of Windows.

What version of Acronis are you using? Are you using True Image Home 2013? I don't believe prior versions had UEFI support.

Backup and Restore is probably the least of your concerns at the moment.

How are you running Acronis? Via an external DVD drive or a USB stick? If you are using a USB stick, are you using a USB 2.0 or 3.0 port? Stick with the USB 2.0 port for either a DVD or USB stick.

 

Anyone here with a Samsung 900X3C au02se who has changed out the sandisk U100 msata with a-data xpg sx300 128gb msata? Just like to be sure it will work before buying and upgrading. Thanks.

 

Did you flash the bios with existing or new version bios driver?

 

A CMOS reset might help: Disconnect the mains power then disconnect the battery by poking an unbent paperclip through the hole in the bottom (next to a symbol which is a rectangle with a cross in it) then hold down the power button for a minute or thereabouts. Then reconnect the mains (the battery will reconnect automatically) and try booting. Don't hold down F2 to get into the BIOS - keep tapping the key.

John

 

Firstly thanks to everyone who has replied to help me with my problem, unfortunately I haven't managed to get any further with it.

Presumably you would need a full retail disc to do a new install of Windows? (My laptop didn't come with any discs...). If someone were to this, the drivers are still available on the Samsung site, right? Although I guess it would save a bit of time...

Yes I'm using True Image 2013 which claims to have UEFI support. I was running it from Windows, but I shall try running it from a 2.0 USB now.

I'm not sure which I used as I did it through the SW Update bios update program whilst upgrading and installing the drivers e.t.c.

This sounded like it might work, but I tried it and I still can't get into the BIOS settings

 

I went back and re-read your original problem. I have seen this issue on a previous Series 9 my son now has.

As I understand it, your machine will still boot to Windows. That's a good thing. Download and install the latest version of Samsung Easy Settings. Launch Easy Settings and review the current settings for Fast Boot and other boot oriented settings like the ability to suppress the Windows logo on boot. If those are enabled, disable them and shutdown. Power your machine back on and see if that resolved the issue.

If it doesn't, enable the settings and shutdown.

Power back up and go back into Easy Settings and disable them. Shut down.

Some versions of Samsung Easy Settings don't actually write the settings correctly into the BIOS which can drive you mad. At least that was how I discovered this and hit this issue with a NP900X3B.

Good luck

If this doesn't work, I am all out of ideas and a support call is probably your next move.

 

Hey All,

just a quick question. Does it really worth to purchase a Crucial M4 256GB SSD instead of Sandisk U100 to my NP900X3C? I've never had PC or notebook with SSD and i'm very satisfied with the performance, i mean starting up, shutting down, running apps etc...it's already much faster than a same Core i5 computer with HDD. I've seen the test results, could i feel the difference in the real world?

Thx!

 

If you like what you have, why spend money?