I just ordered the 512 MZRPC512 from Aliexpress and installed it last night. If you are interested, now is the time. There is lots of inventory, and they're willing to reduce the price on these obscure SSDs. I got mine for $270.
steps:
1. buy SSD (this takes a while to ship) - mine took about 20 days
2. install Acronis True Image - you can use other solutions, but this to me was the easiest program to use
3. create a backup to an external hardrive
4. create a recovery media to usb using acronis
5. turn off your machine and install the new SSD that you just received in the mail!!
- be patient here and go slowly
- lots of small screws of various sizes
- tip: arrange the screws in a map-like arrangement
- watch the video on youtube for disassembling the z2
- make sure the latch is secure on the ribbon for the SSD
6. close everything up nice and tight, but don't strip the screws
7. when you reboot, press F2 repeatedly to go to bios and change the boot order to:
external disk
internal disk
network
(it uses f5 and f6 to move up and down... weird)
8. in the bios, change the raid setting to [show] from [hide]
- you need this to configure the raid drive
9. save and exit
10. press ctrl-i to enter the raid controller setup
- configure it as per defaults
11. reboot with your restore/recovery usb in the drive, not your acronis backup
- once acronis restore boots up, plug in your backup harddrive, and follow the steps to restore to your new SDD
- watch in amazement as your computer comes back to life exactly as it was before you started this process
- after all this is done, you'll be sad and confused for a moment because your SDD hasn't changed size at all
- 'my computer' will show the same small size SDD, but wait
12. open disk management
- here you'll see there is lots of hd space waiting to be used
- go to your active partition which holds your window and right click to show the option to extend your drive
- do this and include the new bit of SDD space
- it'll take a second, but after that you'll have a fully restored drive with lots of additional space.
the whole process (including backup and restore time) took me about 2.5 hours to complete
I know this is a slightly older model now, but with windows 10 around the corner (and free as an upgrade) now is the time to do this.
my 8gb i7 now has the room to do cool stuff... hopefully it'll help you as well.
EDIT: Thanks anytimer for the clarification. While I know the difference between SSD and Harddrive, it is technically incorrect to equate them.
I did try to keep the wording of these instructions as simple as possible so as to not scare off people who might not be overly technically inclined.
Last edited:
Feb 11, 2015
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
