I finally had a chance to sit down and film the M.2 hard drive upgrade on the MSI GS60 editing laptop I picked up. The total tear down and reassembly time was a little less then an hour and I only ended up with one extra screw (no idea where that goes). The most nerve wrecking part is detaching the motherboard to get to the second M.2 drive slot, everything else is pretty straight forward.

Before you get started on this, make sure you create a USB recovery drive! The MSI GS60 does not come with a physical copy of windows, MSI includes an easy to use tool for this, but the recovery files are stored on the 1 TB drive. If you remove it before you create a disk, you’re going to have a tough time restoring windows on the new hard drive.

MSI GS60 4k Ghost Pro (1 of 1)

You can find the screwdriver set I used here, it’s cheap but effective. If you mess up any of the tape holding the ribbon cables, you can find it here. Also this upgrade is not for the faint of heart, if you aren’t comfortable with digging into the guts of your brand new $2000 laptop, you might want to look at some of the already upgraded units on Amazon.

Drive speeds

The original Toshiba M.2 SSD has some pretty decent numbers, and the Crucial 512GB SSD isn’t far behind with writes only trailing slightly. The Samsung 840 EVO falls right in line with the rest of the drives, just make sure you run the you run the Samsung restoration and firmware update tool and you should be good to go.

Now that I have the MSI GS60 upgraded it might be time for some rendering test. I have a titan, the R9 290x, and a GTX 680 in the studio, I’ll post some 4k rendering results next week. It’ll be interesting to see how the GS60 stacks up.

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