How2: Installing an SSD in an MSI GL62VR

Produced by Young Jeohn

The MSI GL62VR is a great value-for-money laptop that comes with 512GB of storage. But if you need more space, can you add another SSD or a hard drive?

This video will show you how to take apart the MSI GL62VR laptop. No service manuals were found for this unit (and we searched really hard) so we just opened up the MSI without one, crossed our fingers and hoped there was an open drive bay (thankfully there was!)

Had there not been one, we'd have been forced to:

  1. Pick up an external enclosure for use with a USB cable or
  2. Swap out the DVD drive

Either of these alternatives would have resulted in much slower transfer speeds, making no sense in purchasing an SSD in the first place.

Happily, the existing 512GB of storage is an NVMe (chip), so there's space for another 2.5" SATA drive. Read/Write speeds are respectable and super quick compared to spinning harddrives. 

Benchmark tests using CrystalDiskMark resulted in around 520MB/sec read and 495MB/sec write. In actual copying of large files using Windows 10 file explorer, I observed an average of 440MB/sec transfer rates. 

Really a huge improvement from traditional hard drives considering the overhead like the distance between two storage drives, bus and OS file handling tasks.

Watch the video and see if it can help you to upgrade your own MSI laptop!

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Check prices --- Amazon affiliate link
http://amzn.to/2Co9a24 --- MSI GL62VR laptop
https://amzn.to/2Jx75HR --- Micron 1100 2TB 2.5" SSD Sata