Aspire E5-771G 17.3" HD+ - 1 or 2 hdd / SSD slots and 7 or 9,5mm ?

Just got this baby a few days ago, and I'm really liking the performance so far, except the sluggish hard drive. Used to my high-end desktop, I guess. Regardless, I'd like to throw in an SSD in the laptop, though I can't seem to find any info on whether there are one or two hard drive slots in there, and which dimension SSD I'd have to get. Most of the information is on the 15" laptops. If there's two, I don't need more than a 120GB SSD. If there's only one, I'll have to get a 500GB, if not more. Those things are still pricey, and being a student I don't have a whole lot of cash to spare.

The BIOS references HDD 0 and HDD 1, so I'm hopeful, but I don't want to pick the thing apart more times than I have to. I've seen how upgrade unfriendly these things are. And at any rate, I don't have much faith that there'll be a sticker in there informing whether it takes a 7 or 9,5mm drive.

Any takers?

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silizium

It's very easy to open the cover on the bottom side of your notebook. You can look for youself how much slots in there. And you could use a ruler to measure the hight. Your notebook is very similar to my model (V3-772G), there should be two bays for hard drives. Normally there should also be a M.2 connector.

Edit: It seems, the differences are far greater than expected. The following video shows the someone who is open his notebook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeXdFn0kcME

Sehnsucht

I study IT, and have worked as a PC technician, so I know how to work on a laptop; I just don't like to. The cables are brittle and hard to work with, and I feel like I have to walk on eggshells when opening one up. And opening a brand new laptop to boot is a last resort until I have whatever part I need ready for installing.

The video helped though, so thanks for posting it. I didn't find that one when I searched on YouTube. Not a fan of having to pluck 3000 screws just to get to the drive bay, but on the plus side; having just one big cover reduces the chassis flexing and "creaking" considerably. The hard drive is a WD Blue 1TB, around 9mm thickness. Oddly enough there's only one bay, even though there are several other E5-771G models that comes with 2 disks (and with an optical drive). The motherboard must be a bit more compact on those.

I thought about it for a spell and decided to just order a Crucial MX100 256GB to replace the sluggish WD Blue. I considered getting a WD Black 750GB 7200RPM, but the added noise, higher power consumption and mediocre performance gains probably aren't worth it. I have at least 3 external drives not in use, so if I need extra storage, I can use one of those.

I use VMware / Hyper-V a lot for school, and even a guest Ubuntu OS is pretty sluggish on my current laptop drive. I haven't tried running my Server 2012 R2 setup yet with 5 servers running simultaneously, but I imagine starting all those would take forever. Should be feasible with a decent SSD, and maybe a RAM upgrade later on.

Excited to see how it'll run; gives me an excuse to upgrade to 8.1 Pro anyway when switching disks. Thanks for posting the video.

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