- [Dave] Hi, Dave here.
In this video,
I will upgrade this laptop's hard drive.
So let's go.
The current hard drive is a magnetic-based hard disc drive,
and it just failed.
And it's a Windows failure,
which I show how to repair in another video.
For this video, we're just upgrading the drive.
I wanted to upgrade this drive anyway,
and I was just waiting until it had its first failure.
So we'll be upgrading this to a solid state drive,
or an SSD.
All right, so I've already removed the bottom cover
and the plethora of screws that come with this.
And of course, I powered it down and removed the battery.
Always wanna do that before you start
any installation or upgrade.
And make sure that you have your ESD prevention,
electrostatic discharge prevention.
I've got my wrist strap here and some other tools for that,
but make sure you're connected to a grounded source,
and I talk about that more in another video as well.
Okay, so this laptop is a Toshiba Satellite E45,
and it's common with laptops that are a couple years older,
ones that were built, say, between 2010 and 2015
and maybe even beyond...
You'll find that these laptops come
with a magnetic-based hard drive.
And this particular one runs at 5,400 RPM.
It's not very quick with Windows,
and I do need to use Windows 10 Pro
for this particular system.
I'm thinking that a solid state drive, an SSD,
will definitely help with the sluggish performance,
and it should be more robust.
All right, so I've zoomed in here
to the hard drive a little bit,
and it's got a main connector here,
but before we can get the hard drive out
and get to that main connector,
we have to remove these flex cables.
And this is common on laptops.
What you see here, you have the main motherboard,
you have your main board,
and then you have over here a secondary circuit board,
and that's used for a couple of the side connections
on a laptop.
We've got an audio.
That's our 3.5 millimeter or 1/8 inch jack.
We've got a USB port and an HDMI port.
So all these need to communicate with the main board,
and it does that through these flex connectors.
But unfortunately, they're in the way of the hard drive,
so we have to remove those
in order to get the hard drive out.
So when you're working on laptops and other mobile devices,
you wanna have a nice toolkit
and have some shims available to you.
And so here's an example of one.
And here's another.
Call this a guitar pick shim, right?
Or you could use an actual guitar pick,
whatever you like.
What I like to use for these flex connectors
is this little tool.
This is actually meant for displays,
but it's very thin and it's fairly strong.
Make sure that you're using plastic
for these types of things.
And you want something small but strong and thin,
so you can easily get into these connectors
without touching the motherboard
and without damaging any components on the laptop.
So let's remove these.
What we have to do is we have to flip open
the flex connectors.
And so we just pry in here real easily.
And I hardly did anything, and that clicked open.
And we'll do that for each of these.
And actually, I'm not touching the flex cable.
I'm just fitting the tool underneath the flex connector
and prying it up.
And you'll see you have these handles here,
these little tabs.
That's used to pull out the cable,
so you don't actually touch the cable.
And we'll do this last one.
Easy peasy.
And then we can take out the cable,
and you can do this a couple ways.
You can use the tool and just kind of back it off,
or you can grab from that tab.
Okay, it comes out real easy.
You wanna be very gentle with these
and don't touch the actual contacts on the edge.
And so we'll put this aside.
And you may choose to put this in an antistatic bag,
but you wanna put it aside.
What I like to do is I like to put it aside
in the same orientation the way we found it
and possibly take notes, document.
And really, it's a good idea to take a picture of the laptop
before you start
as part of your documentation, okay?
So we'll pull this other cable out.
All right.
That one, you have to be a little bit more gentle with.
We'll place that to the side as well.
That exposes our hard drive and allows us to take that out.
We can pry this out as well.
You might need something a little bit stronger
than what I was just using to get that out.
And in some cases, it'll just come out on its own.
And I just pulled from the rubber casing that's here.
And then what you'll see
is you'll see we have a connection.
I don't wanna pull too hard on this,
but we have our SATA and power connections here.
So what we wanna do
is we wanna pull that connector off evenly.
And there is your connection.
And you have your data and your power connections.
And so, for example, if you look here,
you'll see the data and power connections on a drive
and on a drive that's been opened up,
and the power is 15-pin.
That's the longer connector.
And the data is seven-pin.
You can actually count out those pins.
All right, so that is our drive.
You have a couple additional pins here, which we rarely use.
Jumpers.
But that is our data seven-pin
and our power 15-pin right there.
Now, this has this housing,
and I like to save these so that we can use them
with the new drive we're gonna put in.
And you may or may not find some aluminum,
which you can try to save.
It depends on the drive.
On this one, it's gonna be tough to save this.
Usually, you just leave it on.
Okay, now I'm gonna hold onto this drive.
As I say, I show how to repair the Windows issues
in another video.
And of course, you may want to recover data from this,
and I show how to do that in another video as well.
But now what we wanna do
is we wanna get that new drive out.
So we'll take that now.
And this is a solid state drive, as I mentioned.
And you got the same connectors here.
You'll notice we don't have any of those jumpers
'cause we rarely use those,
but this has gotta connect in the same way.
We've gotta orient it in the same way,
so we're gonna connect it this way.
And we'll reapply our little rubber assembly here.
This is meant to be something
that's gonna help it from being shock proof
if you have a magnetic drive, like this older drive.
But it'll help to keep this drive fitting in there nicely.
We don't really need it 'cause there's no moving parts,
but it'll be nice because it'll keep it
fit in the bay here nicely without moving.
Okay, so it might take a little doing
to get that rubber case on there,
that rubber casing.
It's like a jacket, and it has little...
Instead of screws going into the hard drive on the side,
it's got little tabs that go in there.
Okay, so once we've applied that,
we'll connect our SATA and power right here.
Always try to connect evenly,
so it goes in all at once without wiggling back and forth,
so we don't damage any connectors.
And then we'll place this into our bay.
Sometimes it might be a little tough to get that in there
with that rubber jacket on the hard drive.
So if you have to, you can remove it,
but it's a good idea to try to keep these.
That's gonna fit in there nicely.
Okay, and we'll make sure
that our connector is in here good.
And we wanna make sure that the cable here...
Tuck that in a little bit,
so that it doesn't get damaged
when we put the bottom cover back on.
Make sure it's flush in there.
Okay, so the hard drive is connected.
Now, we just have to put the flex connectors back on.
So we'll grab both of those.
And these can be a little tricky.
We'll put this one in.
Okay, and you can see if it's in all the way.
You can look for those copper connectors,
make sure they're actually inserted in there.
And so it can be a little...
This is the tougher part, really, of any installation.
So we'll put that in, and we'll use our shim once again...
To close that.
And you can use another tool if you like.
Maybe something a little flatter
might be a little better here,
but I have this available.
Okay, we'll get this other connector in here.
Flatten it down.
And close that.
Feels good.
That was the tougher flex cable.
And we'll take the other one.
This one is a little bit easier.
We'll place that in there.
And you know,
a lot of people are just gonna use their fingers
to close these,
which in a lot of cases you can.
I just don't like to get my finger close to the board,
to the circuit board.
I don't wanna damage anything,
even though we do have ESD protection.
So I'll keep using my connector here, or my shim,
and we'll connect the other side.
Use that blue tab to help push it in.
Okay, and voila.
Now, that doesn't affect the hard drive.
Those connectors, even if they are not connected properly,
that'll affect this secondary board here,
with the audio, USB, and HDMI ports.
So, you know, basically,
that would be the only thing that would fail
if there was a problem with one or both of these connectors,
but you'd always wanna check that,
always test these ports
because we were making changes here.
And you know, these flex cables...
I mean, the connection is not very strong,
so sometimes when you're troubleshooting a laptop,
this is something to check.
Check and make sure that these cables did not come loose
'cause that can happen fairly easily,
the connector here.
The tab that closes that could have popped up,
and the whole cable could have come out.
That's common with a lot of different mobile devices
that use this flex cable technology.
Okay, there you have it.
We have removed the old hard drive,
the magnetic-based drive.
And again, this is common with laptops.
You have a magnetic-based drive like this,
and it just doesn't run fast enough or it fails.
And you can upgrade it to a solid state drive
for more performance, possibly more speed.
And so in another video,
I'm going to also be upgrading the RAM.
And once that's done, we'll install the new operating system
and compare this laptop to another laptop
that's basically identical, with its original equipment,
and see how much faster and how much more efficient
and what better performance we get on the laptop
at that point.
And of course, when you're finished,
you wanna case everything back up.
But again, in another video,
we're going to change out this memory
and move on from there.
So that's it for this video.
The hard drive's been upgraded.
Installation is complete.