How To:Upgrade a Samsung NC10 Hard Drive
Warning: In order to upgrade your HD you will need to open / disassemble your netbook. This will void your warranty. It is possible to damage your netbook in the process - So only do this if you know what you're doing!
Contents |
Upgrading your Samsung NC10 Hard Drive
Considering possible alternative drives
See here for specs of the drive that ships with the NC10 (at least with mine, that is - yours might have come with another drive, you'll need to check to be sure)
There's a number of reasons for upgrading to a new drive:
- more capacity - right now, 2.5" drives are available in sizes up to 500GB.
- lower power consumption
- more speed
- smaller footprint - if you plan on installing other things inside your NC10 you might need that extra space you can get from installing a 1.8" drive (beware, though - standard 1.8" mechanical hard drives run at a lower RPM so they're somewhat slower than 2.5" models... If you're going for 1.8" you should consider a SSD)
- SSD - A solid state drive combines a number of the above advantages, though it comes at a price. At this point in time the Intel X25-M / X18-M seem to be a good option (X25 being the 2.5" model, X18 the 1.8" one, both available in capacities up to 160GB).
- There's also solutions like this one.
Preparation
If you don't want to install a new OS after the upgrade you can clone your existing installation onto your new drive. A good way to do this is clonezilla - easy to use, reliable and stable, and freeware, too.
Since clonezilla clones the entire drive, in order to keep the resulting image file as small as possible (and thus the process of copying the image back to the drive as fast as possible) it is a good idea to put a bit of thought into what your drive image should look like.
Here's what I do:
- move my personal data (mp3-files, images, ...) to an external drive
- clean up my windows installation as much as possible (remove any temp files, uninstall everything I don't really use)
- tweak it all up as far as i can / want to (see this thread for reference)
- make sure all drivers are installed and everything works as I expect it to
- I also tend to leave a few basic utilities that I'll need in a fresh system anyway, like 7zip, image viewer, TweakUI, Rocketdock
...so that I end up with a fast, lean system. That way, whenever something messed up my system beyond repair, I can always go back to my Image file and restore it in a matter of minutes. Like a restore point, only more reliable imho. In fact I like to look at this as the second leg of my general backup strategy - back up data on a regular basis and always have an image of a clean system around!
Since the NC10 comes without any optical drive I think the best way to go then is create the image file to use with a bootable USB stick. See this guide for a detailed explanation on how to do this.
Installing the new HD
See How To:Disassemble Your Samsung Netbook for a guide on how to open your sammy.
Installation of the new drive is pretty easy, then - unscrew and remove the old drive, remove the bracket from the drive, attach it to the new one, put the new drive back in - that's it.
Links
- Another detailed guide to HD upgrade(including video) can be found here.
- A list of possible alternative drives which also includes (updated) prices can be found here.
Know something we don't? Help keep the wiki up to date! Register to remove ads.
