MSI GS60 PL-012US - SSD Upgrade questions,

Hello All,

I am a new member here hoping someone could help me with my questions:

I am trying to add an M.2 SSD Drive to my Laptop (MSI GS60 PL-012US) my questions are:

1. How many M.2 does the laptop fit? I believe 2?
2. Whats the maximum capacity on each bay?
3. Once the SSD is installed how can i install a fresh copy of windows on it?MSI doesn't provide a product key? Do i have to use a USB Flash drive? and how does that work?

Also, should i raid all the drives? or leave them as is?

Any information helps.

Thank You for your time.
Here is the SSD M.2 i want to get please let me know if this works with my MSI GS60:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TGIVY1G/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A17MC6HOH9AVE6

Best Regards,

 

1: It can support up to 2 M.2 SSDs.

2: It can support the capacity of what's available in the market.

3: Since OS disk are not provided by MSI so it's better to create a recovery USB flash drive so you can restore the OS to your new SSD. if you are not going to RAID the SSDs you can leave as is and format the second SSD as data drive.

If you do RAID the SSDs you will get better performance but you will lost all of your files on the original SSD, therefore, you will need to use the recovery USB to restore the OS.

 

Thank you for the info Ken.

How do i create a recovery USB Drive and how do i restore from that recovery.

I am assuming i restore by going to bios and selecting the flash drive to boot first, as for the creating the recovery Drive how do i do that?

 

To do a clean install of Windows you can create install media by following the instructions here http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/create-reset-refresh-media

Windows 8/8.1 no longer includes a printed key like previous versions did. Its embedded in the BIOS and Windows will know where to go find it.

 

Thank you for the help man.
Whats left on my list is RAID0 how do i raid 0 my SSDs? and before restoring the SSDs do i have to format the main drive so the windows key works?

Thank you again

 

You need to enable raid mode in the bios and then you either get a menu option during boot to enter the raid manager or an option in the bios itself.

 

Thank you for the help i will try to set this up tomorrow and see how it goes.

 

Raiding disks does erase any drive involved and changing from AHCI to RAID usually requires an OS re-install too even if the OS is not on a disk put into an array since it requires different drivers during boot.

 

I'll make sure to have the flash drive ready with the boo table windows on it, then do the raid and restore the laptop.

Thank You for the help

 

Turns out I have 1 M2 SSD slot not 2.

GS60 with graphic card in the 800 series have 1 SSD slot only

I guess no raid for me unless i can raid it with the 2.5 regular SSD.

 

Yeah now I remembered, the GS60 Ghost-012 and 013 only have 1 M.2 slot.

 

delete.