Surface Studio 2.5" Hard Drive Replacement

Written By: The Raptor
  • Comments: 15
Surface Studio 2.5" Hard Drive Replacement

Difficulty

Moderate

Steps

5

Time Required

20 - 30 minutes

Introduction

Do you want a bigger hard drive or a second SSD? Follow this guide to replace your hard drive.

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    • Lay the Surface face down on a padded surface

    • Be careful not to scratch the screen when laying it face down

    • Remove the four rubber feet at each corner concealing the Torx screws

    • Remove the four Torx screws under the rubber feet.

    • Two screws on the upper corners are longer than two screws on the lower corners.

    • Attach suction cups to the bottom cover and then pull on the suction cups to free the bottom cover.

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    • Remove five torx screws holding the two fans to the midframe

    • Remove the two fans

    • The fan connectors are behind the midframe and not yet accessible. Let the fans hang loosely until you can access the connectors.

    • Four large torx screws and four small torx screws hold the midframe to the upper frame.

    • Remove four large torx screws holding the midframe

    • Remove four small torx screws holding the midframe

    4th blue is missing and is above the far right green circle. In line with the second red circle and below the GPU heat sink.

    Steven McCarthy -

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    • Slowly remove the midframe

    • Be careful: the speaker on the midframe is still attached to the motherboard

    • Detach the connectors for the two fans and the speaker

    how to attach speaker after removing it ?

    Małgorzata Nowaczewska -

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    • With the midframe removed, it is also possible to replace the M.2 SSD during this step

    • The hard drive is underneath the heatsink so the heatsink must be removed

    • Remove four spring loaded torx screw labeled 1 to 4

    • Remove three torx screw labeled 5 to 7

    • Remove 5mm hex mounting post

    • Use a spudger to remove the heatsink assembly from the motherboard

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    • Remove three torx screws holding the hard drive brackets

    • Remove 5mm hex mounting post

    • Remove the hard drive and disconnect the SATA/SATA power cable

    • Remove four torx screws holding the hard drive brackets to the hard drive

    • On reassembly, be sure to clean the CPU and GPU and heat sink and reapply thermal compound to the CPU and GPU

Conclusion

To reassemble your device, follow these instructions in reverse order.

Author

The Raptor

Member since: 28/11/16

6043 Reputation

13 comments

Thank you for this step by step guide to replace the "Hard Drive" Here are a few measures that I took before drive replacement:

1) have to turn off drive encryption

2) I cloned the drive to the new SSD drive (I used Samsung 850 PRO 1TB) using Acronis True Image

3) Replaced the drive followed your instructions.

4) Turned ON the Surface Studio and success! no issues and better performance.

Carlos Idrobo -

Does changing to a SSD drive cut down on the fan noise?

vanstar7 -

Does changing to a SSD drive cut down on the fan noise?

vanstar7 - January 15

No, fan noise level does not change, the heat that is been produced comes mostly from the processor.

Carlos Idrobo -

I upgraded to to a SATA SSD 2TB and a M.2 NVMe SSD 1TB and wrote my experience here:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/cesarde...

Cesar De la Torre -

Blog moved

http://cesardelatorre.azurewebsites.net/...

Trevor Tirrell -

Hi Cesar, When I load the RST_AHCI “Intel Chipset SATA RAID Controller” drivers, downloaded from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download.... It doesn´t recognize my m.2 ssd 64gb/Go. I have a Surface Studio core i5. I don´t know what else to do to install windows in that disk.

Cristian Adrian Blanco Montero -

Hi Cesar. I can’t get your link to the blog on the Surface Studio SSD upgrade to work. Is it still valid please?

Thank you.

David

David Phillips -

Has anyone done this lately? The hardware update was no problem, however I can’t get past windows update. I can install windows to either drive, but as soon as I update it, the thing hangs on boot, and I can’t recover it at all, without full reload. seems like the raid driver RST_AHCI, just will not work for me.

Eth -

I’m trying to convert to Ubuntu, but that won’t work with RAID. I thought if I can separate the HDD from the SSD, the 128GB SSD would be plenty to install Ubuntu and program files, then use the HDD for user files. How to separate the disks as a software fix?

Richard Mayo -

Which disk number (0 or 1) is the M.2 drive? I replaced both with 2TB drives, and I don’t know which one is which.

Matt Perry -

From what I have read, the M.2 is drive 1.

Blake Lowry -

Is it really necessary to reapply thermal compound? That’s the first I’ve seen it mentioned.

Blake Lowry -

mine does not boot, witch hard drive has the os ?? the ssd or the regular one>?

La ruta del sabor nebraska -