A warning for those thinking of upgrading the SSD.

I just wanted to post a warning for anyone thinking of upgrading the 2014 Blade SSD.

I got my Blade roughly a week ago. I used it for a while before I received a Crucial M550 512GB and it was perfect. I cloned the stock drive to the M550 and installed it. Everything went great and it seemed to work fine, tested good with disk benchmarks, everything seemed fine.

Then I started to notice things that did not happen on the stock drive. Weird pauses when using the laptop, the keyboard seemed less responsive (it would miss keystrokes), games that worked fine with everything stock would now randomly crash. I thought maybe the ribbon cable that you have to move wasn't seated right. I thought maybe the cloned image was broken. I tried a bunch of different things but nothing fixed the issues.

Then I swapped the stock drive back in because I was going to return the machine for an exchange. Poof, everything is perfect again. System is stable, no weird pauses, keyboard is responsive, games that crashed are running great. I don't really know why this is the case. The same M550 in another laptop seems to work fine. I speculate that it has something to do with power draw. It seems a bit crazy that they would engineer it that close but it is possible. They are using a 150W PSU for very nearly exactly 150W of hardware. Perhaps under load the Crucial drive draws a few more watts and causes the system instability. Maybe there is some other cause.

TLDR: Replacing the Blade SSD with an M550 caused significant problems for me. The M550 seems fine with a different laptop, the Blade seems fine with the stock drive, together there are big problems. For now I would be caution you against ordering a Blade with the plan of upgrading the SSD with an M550.

 

I am using M550 on my razer blade and I do not have any of your issues yet.

 

It has nothing to do with power draw. Many people are reporting problems with those drives--BSODs, erratic behavior, stuttering, and data corruption: Solid State Drives (SSD) - Crucial Community.

It's likely that second laptop of yours just has the right driver/OS configuration to make the M550 happy.

 

Entirely possible, but I tried everything to make the drive work on the Blade. This is the first time I have ever had trouble with something like an SSD swap. If I had known this was likely to happen I wouldn't have bothered since the minor saving are not at all worth the hassle and potential random bugs and stability issues.

I just assumed it would work fine, and I hadn't seen anyone else reporting these issues.

 

My 550 will be here in a few days so I will find out if I have problems. I'm glad the poster above reported no issues. I'd say my chances are 50/50 at this point

 

Now this make me worried. already ordered my m550 and its already shipped

what do u mean? is there a config settings for the blade to make it function right?

 

you said youre gonna exchange the machine. will razer still approves it even tho you already open the blade?

 

Can someone tell me how to disconnect the ribbon cable that's covering the ssd? I'm afraid I'll tear it if i try to pull it out horizontally.

Is the black bar on the ribbon connector supposed to be some sort of latch that holds the ribbon in place? I don't want to try to move it for fear the connector would break...

Help would be much appreciated!

 

Yes, you have it right. The dark bar will gently tip upwards and it will release pressure on the ribbon cable. You can use a screwdriver end or you fingernail. Just be careful. Then the ribbon will pull right out, no pressure needed. Do the reverse to get it back in. Make sure you get it all the way in before putting the dark bar back down.

It opens up as you would imagine, hinging on the back side of the connector and opening on the front where the ribbon is. Hope that helps!

 

Thanks for the quick response!

I'm going to try it right away!

 

Another question:

How do I take out the SSD? Do I just pull it out towards the right after unscrewing the screw that's holding it in place?

 

Yes, straight out. And straight back in.

 

Hopefully there is no proprietary hardware/software drama going on here on Razers end.... I feel that it is not the PSU otherwise you would be having larger issues than what you described.

 

I got it from Microsoft, they were fine with doing an exchange to a 512GB.

At it's worst my NVidia GPU would completely disappear, which was actually when I initially made my exchange request. Then when I swapped the drives back it worked perfectly.