 Corsair RM series power supplies are optimized for silent operation. Click now to learn more. Now I often get asked by people, how much storage should I get for my computer, whether it's an SSD or whether it's a hard drive, and the answer invariably is, I don't know. How am I supposed to know how much storage you need? I can't. However, what I can tell you is that for me personally, 120 or 128 gigs, which is the SSD size that you'll find in a lot of more entry level machines these days, is really not enough for me. I find that 256 or 240 gig class drives are the sweet spot in terms of a price to capacity ratio. And if you can go higher and you can still fit that in your budget, then great. Now Intel sent over this XPS 12 Ultrabook, which I kind of fired up and I was like, oh, it's got Core i5, okay, cool. It's got nice IPS, 1920 by 1080 or whatever it is, that 1080p thing screen. Oh, it's got a 120 gig SSD. So the first thing I did was I was like, oh crap, can I take it apart? And the answer is yes. It doesn't take a two and a half inch SSD, it takes an M SETA SSD. So this is, I think, the first time we really talked about M SETA online as tech tips. What it is, is it's a smaller SETA standard. So it's still just as fast as a regular SETA drive in most cases. It still uses the SETA interface. So it's not like a PCI express based one or anything like that. But what it is, is it's super small. So all the flash chips are integrated onto a tiny little PCB and the controller's on there and this little custom connector here that doesn't have any housings around it, it's just a SETA interface with no housings around it and moved around a little bit. So what we're going to do is we're going to walk you through the steps of upgrading the SSD in your notebook. It's really important to find out from the manufacturer what type of drive your model accepts, whether it's a nine millimeter, two and a half inch drive, a seven millimeter, two and a half inch drive, a five mil, two and a half inch drive, or even an M SETA, or even a proprietary standard. Like for example, Apple's recent notebooks are often using soldered SSDs that are right on the motherboard, so you can't replace them at all. And then work from that knowledge. So without further ado, here's my M SETA SSD upgrade on the Dell XPS 12. Relacing two shot one take two. So the first step is really more of a before you begin type thing. So here's that drive that I was talking about before. Because we're using M SETA, it's a little bit inconvenient for data migration because we can't just use one of these handy dandy USB to SETA interface cables to just clone the drive before we even do the transfer. So what we'll have to do is we'll have to actually back up everything that's on here. The good news is because it's a factory loadout, there's not that much data on there. So you can actually back up to an external hard drive or even a large USB key. If you happen to have one, then you can manually transfer everything back over to the new M SETA drive once you are done. So you just got to figure out a workflow for yourself. If you're not using M SETA though, it is quite a bit easier. We're using Paragon software for the backup and the restore. Step two is to make sure you have a nice safe anti-static workstation. In our case, we're using a Mod-Mat main board from Mod-Write and we're using the iFixit screwdriver kit with a Torx 5 bit on the end of the screwdriver to get this baby open. So step one is to locate all of the screws and after removing them, put them in a safe place, such as a small plastic container like the one that happens to be included with your drive. Wow, look how that worked out. Once you've removed all the screws, carefully lift up the bottom cover. Never force anything. Remember guys that there are ports around the outside edges that might stick through the chassis so you don't want to put unnecessary strain on those. Now that we've got our opened up, we can take a moment to just admire the workmanship that goes into a modern ultrabook. So you can see like more than half of the interior is taken up by the massive battery, which is actually, it looks like you could probably swap it out if you really needed to, which is kind of cool. I also like that Dell made it relatively easy to remove this shell. So they did put crappy Torx screws in it, but they didn't make it like, you know, clipped in or anything like that. So you can actually remove it and put it back on without it looking like garbage after. You can see the cooling fan for the CPU right here. This uses onboard graphics. This is the main motherboard right here where you've got your RAM soldered on. So it's four gigs of RAM in this machine by default. The fourth gen one comes with eight gigs by default. And then there's actually a little daughter board over here that has some IO so they were able to get this over here. Right here is your wireless, which you can see is plugged into the antennas, which go up here and then probably around the outside of something. You want those to be nice and big. And then here is our M SETA drive that we're going to be replacing. So all we got to do is peel up this little cover right here. All right. And we see that it is held in by one simple screw. Now you can see once you remove the screw that the M SETA drive actually lifts itself. This is okay. This is a function of the slot here that it's supposed to do that, which makes it very, very easy to carefully remove. So you can see whatever's in here right now is an OEM part number from Samsung. So you can see the Samsung flash modules on there as well as I'm not too worried about the warranty on this thing. So let's just go ahead and find out what kind of controller it's using. Probably Samsung. Samsung is the world's number one SSD manufacturer, not just for their own drives, but also for other drives. So there's a Samsung DRAM chip right there and then a Samsung, presumably, yep, Samsung controller right there. So this is a Samsung SSD. So now that we have both SSDs, you can see that they actually use very similar configurations because there's only so much space on an M SETA PCB and you have to put four flash chips. So here we can flip over the ADATA one. There you go. So you're going to have to fit four flash chips, your controller as well as your cache. So there's only so many options in terms of layout. So installation is simple. We've installed it the same way that we took it out. So you actually go in at an angle, fold it down flat, find that Phillips head screw, which is different from all the others. Remember anytime you're disassembling a notebook, unless screws are like markedly different from each other and you're not going very far into it, you're going to want to keep all the different types of screws labeled and separate from each other. Then we're going to lay this back on top of it and that is it. The physical aspect of the upgrade is done. So as long as our data migration worked, we're good to go. Now that we're done, we can admire the sexy interior, which unfortunately isn't as sexy as the insides of Apple's notebooks. They do such a good job. Like opening up a MacBook, you're just like, oh yeah, they put some thought into that. I mean, this ain't bad either, but anyway, we're going to go ahead, put the cover back on, screw everything back into place with our Torx screwdriver again. And that's kind of it. So there you go guys. I hope this was informative. I've actually done notebook storage upgrades before, but I've never done one with an M SATA drive. So there you go. It's pretty much the same procedure, but slightly more different. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos. Leave a like if you liked the video, leave a dislike if you disliked the video and leave a comment if your mother's hair is not on fire right now.