mSATA upgrade for Touchsmart 15 - n088sz

[JudasFPriest]

Hi to everyone,

I am currently experiencing slowdown issues with the upmentioned notebook and I have seen in the maintenance guide that there is, for certain models, a mSATA slot available for a SSD. That would definitely speed up booting time and major applications speed.

I would like to know if my model has such a mSATA port before opening it up (warranty's off already).

I unfortunately did not happen to find the motherboard specifications.

By the way, do you know what the max supported RAM is ? The processor can handle 16 GB, but I do not know for the motherboard, which has 2 slots.

Thank you for all the help you could provide me !

JudasFPriest

[Huffer]

Here's the Service Manual:

Manual

There is an mSATA option but it is limited and likely not what you think:

Supports 24 GB mSATA solid-state drive with system memory up to 8 GB (for use with select computer models with Intel processors and switchable discrete graphics)

On your model I believe the mSATA slot is inside the customer accessible bay next to the WLAN card. However, these mSATA mSSDs are getting hard to find and the system is configured such that if installed it cannot be the boot drive. It uses software to combine with the mechanical drive and "accelerate" it. It actually does speed up boot time quite a bit and makes the computer generally zippier but unlike a true SSD it does not support really fast sustained data transfers. 

Buying, installing and configuring it is a bit of a lost art but I have done it many many times and could walk you through it. The drive itself, a 24 or 32 gig mSATA mSSD is not terribly expensive. 

The laptop can take up to 16 gigs DDR3L-1600 SO-DIMM. 

Post back with any more questions. 

[JudasFPriest]

Hi Huffer,

This is certainly very kind of you.

Do you think this ssd would do the job ? There is a 30 gig version with these specs :

mSATA, protocol: AHCI, read: 550 MB/s, write: 510 MB/s, random 4KB read: 86000 IOPS, random 4KB write: 78000 IOPS • micro SATA 6.0Gb/s

Official webpage

http://www.kingston.com/en/ssd/system-builder/sms200s3

If I can upgrade to 30gb SSD and also to 16gb ram, this will certainly boost things up, at least for a couple years.

Thank you for your help !

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

That is the kind of mSSD that will fit in the slot. You are going to have to use the Intel Rapid Storage utility to configure the mSSD as an "accelerator cache" after it is installed. Post back if you need more help with that. Before you do this you do want to run a general hardware scan in UEFI diagnostics. It does no good to add new hardware on top of old bad hardware unless the new hardware replaces it. 

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