 Now in my recent Tech Tips video about the GX66DR, I actually mentioned that this motherboard, well the motherboard of this laptop supports dual drives and it also has dual drives within the chassis. So it comes by default with 640 gigs total, that is 320 gigs times 2 in RAID 0, but you are not by any means obligated to keep that configuration. So what I'm going to be showing you guys today is I'm going to take apart the laptop and I'm going to show you how I would upgrade it either to a single boot SSD to go with one of those hard drives being left behind for storage or even if I wanted to upgrade to dual SSDs in RAID 0 to replace the dual hard drives that come by default in RAID 0. So the first step is going to be to turn the laptop off, which is fairly straightforward. Well, would normally be fairly straightforward. Shut down. There we go. So we're going to do that before opening up the casing and we're also going to unplug the battery and unplug the power cord just to make sure that while we're tinking around with the inside guts we are not potentially going to be upsetting anything, you know, shorting anything live. So we're going to take that off there. We're going to flip this guy over here. Camera. Chest tripod is going to slip. Awesome to unlock, release, get that out. There's my battery. Okay, 7800 milliamp hours in case anyone was wondering. Okay, so yeah, that's the first step. Actually, maybe in retrospect a better first step would be to use the MSI burn recovery utility to create an OS restore disk. There's a good idea for you. So yes, thank you UIC. I would like to burn this disk. So here we go. Can we restore your system back to default settings if you want to create a recovery disk now? Please follow the instructions to proceed. Okay, click next. Oh, I guess I better put that in the drive and hopefully it'll create a recovery disk. So yeah, we'll do that first. So we're moving the hard drives from the GX 660. Oh, by the way, it was a three disk process and actually took me quite a while to make the MSI recovery disks that I assume I'll need. I mean, I have a Windows disk handy and I could just install like a blank Windows just from scratch and then dig up all the drivers on the MSI website and all that but it might be less hassle for me overall to just use the recovery disk. So one of the screws from each of the drives is actually removed when you take off the back cover and then the other one has to be removed afterwards. Both of these drives should come out fairly easily. I'm just gonna unplug that there. Okay, so drive number one. Looks like there's a little little tab there. Whatever. Slide it. See what happens. If you get the tab that might help. There we go. So the Scorpio Black 320 gig is out. Now let's find the other Scorpio Black 320 gig. So I'm going to take out this little rubber anti-vibration stopper or whatever it happens to be. Slide that there. And there we go. The second Scorpio Black 320 gig is out. So, let's see. If I only wanted to install a single SSD drive and then leave one of these hard drives in as a storage drive, then I would have only taken out now one of the drives. But I've decided what I'm going to do is I'm gonna go with dual SSDs in RAID 0 to replace the dual hard drives in RAID 0. So here's all I have to do. Let's just take the mounting hardware that was on the hard drive that shipped in the system by default. There we are. And throw that on there. So now I've got one SSD ready for mounting. So Corsair Force series SSD. So, oops, which one is which? Are these both the same? Yeah, it looks like both sets of mounting hardware are identical. So all I have to do is slot that in there. There we are. So that's on just fine and dandy there. I'm also gonna have to try and remember which screw goes in now and which one goes in when I replace the cover. So there we are. Opening this up. Got another SSD here that we're gonna be opening for this project. There we are. Open that up. Brand spanking new. And let's get this mounted on here. Maybe I'll just stop for now. You guys can come back after I've put the other drive in. All right, so now I'm powering it on. I've got the, oh, press F3 to run recovery. I have recovery disk number one. You can see, oh, control, oh shoot. Control, delete. So what I'm gonna have to do before I, uh, before I get started with the recovery, turn off, is I'm going to have to configure the RAID because these drives were configured in RAID 0. So I'm going to want to configure my new drives in much the same manner. So I'm pressing control I. So I'm gonna go ahead and create a RAID volume. I'm just gonna, okay, let's call it force since that's the kind of drives we're using. I'm gonna use all the default values. So RAID 0 is for maximum performance, although you lose some of the, well, I mean you lose what many would consider to be the benefit of RAID, which is the, well, the R, redundant. So there's nothing redundant about a RAID 0. In fact, if either of the drives fails for whatever reason, you will lose all of your data. And cdboot could not find boot manager. Hmm. I wonder if I mislabeled that disk. This one's the mystery disk. I actually burned four disks throughout the course of trying to burn three and I may have accidentally missorted these. So let's just see if, let's just see if that figures it out. I'll be back in a moment. All right, it's booting up now. Um, three guesses what the problem was. My disks one and two were uh, mislabeled as each other if you don't feel like guessing. And this disk actually is garbage, which is what I thought it was. Back in a moment. So here I am in the recovery system software. So I'm just gonna click on hard disk recovery, which allows me to uh, format the whole hard drive. The data will be defragmented and restored to factory-developed settings. This one says only the OS drive will be formatted. Okay, well let's go with that one. Cool beans. Okay, that actually took a really long time. It's um, the next day now to be perfectly honest. I had it running overnight. So I ran all three disks through. Now it says Windows 7 recovery. Successful. Press okay and restart the system. Okay, so we'll find out shortly. So there we are. It looks like we are back to a factory fresh setting. Come on focus, please. Focus, focus. You can focus. There you go. So setup will continue after restarting your computer. And uh, yeah, we've got two courses. Corsair 40 gig force series SSDs in there in place of the 320 gig WD Scorpio blacks. There's the raid config and so Yeah, we'll see what happens when we get to the desktop. Exciting. Actually, I guess maybe we'll just stay tuned and have a look at what the uh, boot time is like on our first boot with the Corsair force SSD raid zero array. One of the things I've noticed a lot is that uh, people on the internets tend to uh, okay. Well hold on. Okay We're not going to see it now because uh, it's doing the performance measuring thing. But uh, people on the internets tend to really exaggerate how quickly their computers boot with SSDs. Yeah, it's faster, but honestly boot time is pretty slow. That's faster, but honestly boot time is um, pretty inconsequential when it comes to reasons to upgrade to an SSD. So I'll get this all set up in a moment here. So there we go. It's back to its default configuration. It comes with mostly useful stuff installed. Things like uh, win DVD, adobe reader. It comes with Norton, but that's probably the only one thing that I had to uninstall from this laptop. So just because I teased you guys with it before I'm going to go ahead and show you guys the full reboot cycle with the SSD. So you can see the shutdown was quite fast. We're back to the BIOS already. I'm actually going to have to pull these SSDs out. Now that I've shown you guys how to upgrade your laptop to a dual SSD raid zero configuration. I'll be putting these drives back in for day-to-day use, but just thought it would be kind of a neat video just to show what this laptop is capable of. So there we go. We are back to here. Once I enter the password, we should be able to open up programs pretty much immediately. Well, I haven't set up Windows Media Player yet, but you can clearly see it opened up quickly. So there you go. SSD makes a big difference to performance. Thank you for checking out my upgrade guide on my Linus Tech Tips blog. Don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.