Replacing a HDD with an SSD in ASUS N55JK Laptop

I recently had to upgrade my ASUS with an SSD for higher performance. While the machine itself came with quite some high specs, the 1TB HDD remained a big performance bottleneck.

ASUS N550JK Specs

 -Intel Core i7-4700HQ (Codename: Haswell-MB) has 4 physical cores and 8 logical cores

-A Samsung 8GB DDR3 SDRAM with memory clock speed of 800MHz

-1TB Hard-disk

-Intel HD Graphics 4600 (Video chipset codename: Haswell GT2)

-2GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 850M (Video chipset codename: GM107M)

-15.6’’ Touchscreen

-Windows 8.1

-Motherboard Chipset: Intel HM86 (Lynx Point)

- Intel SSD 240GB (Non-rotating) Serial ATA 6Gb/s 

-Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 (Yes, it Supports 802.11ac !!!) maximum link speed is 144 Mbps

The idea was to swap the 1TB HDD with a 240GB Solid State Drive….Put the 1TB HDD in an external hard disk enclosure to use it for movies, music, backup and saving my ISOs.

This youtube video was really helpful PC Talks 2: How to Upgrade Your Laptop! (ASUS N550JK-DS71T 2014)

The hard drive enclosure

The 240 GB SSD. I was lucky to buy this 256GB SSD on Amazon during 'Black Friday' season so I got some heavy discount. It costed me 130USD but the normal price was 290USD. So far the price of SSD is roughly 1USD per 1GB which is abit expensive but totally worth it 

Opening the asus

The 1TB HDD. After unscrewing and detaching it from the motherboard. Note it’s in an enclosure.

1TB HDD without enclosure

The SSD : http://www.amazon.com/Intel-SERIES-2-5-Inch-Internal-SSDSC2BP240G4R5/dp/B00IF4NGEU

Ensure the ssd fits well and firmly before screwing the laptop back.

At this point the laptop has the ssd which has no OS.

Its required that before you start the replacing process, first download ASUS Backtracker ASUS Backtracker and install it, open the program and create  a backup/restore image. To do this you need a USB drive with at least 16GB space.

Power on the laptop, press Esc and boot from your recovery USB drive. Expect to see the following output if everything was done correctly.

This process takes around 40 minutes, when it finishes you’ll be setting up your laptop for the first time.

Your OS will be like it was the first time you bought the laptop, its licensed, has all asus bloatware,

mc afee antivirus et al. You will need to re-install all your applications.

But now, all my data, softwares and everything else is in the 1TB I removed. H

ow do I access it? I first connected the 1TBHDD with SATA and power connectors then inserted it in an external enclosure.

 1TB HDD

 SATA and power connectors

External enclosure

Now I connected the external 1TB using the USB cable and started installing my softwares/applications. I was shocked by how fast!! my machine became. To put it into perspective, I installed Microsoft Office, Microsoft Project and Microsoft Visio in under 5 minutes. Restarting takes only 7 seconds plus I can run upto 3 virtual machines simultaneously to various Proof of Concept labs.