Adding a 2nd HDD to Dell Studio XPS 1647/1645/1640 laptop

Our house was burglarized in early January, and we lost a whole bunch of portable electronics stuff. Our old fully loaded Inspiron 1420 too was a victim of this theft.

After that I was looking for a good laptop to replace it …. and finally ordered a Dell Studio XPS 1647. It took over a month and a half for Dell to ship the laptop and I finally received it last week. Its a pretty good laptop. However, Dell officially supports only one HDD on it. I wanted to use a SSD (solid state drive) as my primary drive for the OS, and then have a second HDD as secondary drive for bulk data storage. So, I bought a 60GB SSD drive and used it as the primary drive. SSD makes a HUGE difference in the performance. No more waits. The entire windows 7 installation was complete in less than 15 mins…  Its a major improvement in performance.

However, the problem is.. the SSD is way to expensive for now. For e.g: 60 GB SSD costs around $170 to $200… and larger capacities cost a fortune. I am pretty sure prices would come down eventually in a year or so.. But for now, I wanted a second HDD to store bulk data – like movies, HD videos that I capture, tons of photos from my dSLR ..etc.. and 60GB won’t suffice. Offcourse, I can connect an external HDD.. but its a hassle with the laptop. So, the search began to see if I could put a second HDD into this laptop. I had heard of people who had replaced their Optical Disk Drives (CD/DVD) with a HDD Caddy and have a second HDD.

So, I did some research on the net and across this specific thread on the notebook review forums, which I visit frequently. Thanks to the author of the thread, I could confirm that this could be done. But since Dell XPS 1647 is a new model (just released), .. no one had really done this, and I believe I am one of the first few to try this out. Not a big deals as such since 1647 is almost similar to 1645/1640 series (except for the processors) and some have reported success on those systems.

So, here is how I did it….. for all the hopefuls :

Pre-Requisites:

1. Confidence to open your laptop :)
2. HDD Caddy to replace the Optical Disk Drive – I got one from New Mode Electronics, which sells such caddys. This specific machine uses 12.7mm (height) slot-loading model with SATA external interface. You can buy it on ebay too for a cheaper price, but most of them ship from China and takes a long time to arrive.. and if there is a problem..its  a nightmare to return or re-order.
3. A second HDD
4. Dell Service Manual for Studio XPS 16 series – Specially how to replace the Optical Drive
   

Here is the Pictorial :
Click on each of the image below to see a larger image (in a new window)

Step 01 – Ready to Dismantle the Laptop

Step 02 – Remove the Back cover (10 screws to remove)

Step 03 – Remove the Rear caps (slide, and pull out as described in the dell service manual). Don’t apply force.

Step 04 – Remove 14 screws (this is needed to remove the palm rest). On my system 10 screws were marked “P”, 2 were marked “K” and 2 were flat screws.

Step 05 – Turn over, and remove the two screws to remove the palm rest. (Point to remember – once you are done, and when you tighten this later, don’t tighten it too much, else the plastic under it would crack). Once the two screws are removed, use the two tabs to pull out the palm rest (as described in the service manual)

Step 06 – Disconnect the cables connected (by lifting the tab – again – its described very well in the service manual).

Step 07 – Remove the cables connected (two of them). Now the palm rest is free & the motherboard and the ODD is visible

Step 08 – View of the mother board and ODD

Step 09 – View of the mother board and the 3 screws that need to be removed to free the OOD

Step 10 – One screw at the back to remove the ODD. Point to note – the HDD caddy did not have this screw hole – but the HDD Caddy fits in place securely with other 3 screws.

Step 11 – the ODD is now free – You can see the inter-poser (SATA to the motherboard pins) – simply pull it out from the ODD to set it free.

Step 11a – View of ODD out of the system

Step 12 – The ODD and the HDD Caddy that I got from New Mode Electronics. There is a component that is used on the ODD to secure it to the motherboard – This needs to be removed (2 screws) and put on the new HDD caddy as shown in this image.

Step 13 – View of ODD, Securing Component, Interposer, and the HDD Caddy – all side by side.

Step 14 – The new HDD caddy with the 500 GB Seagate HDD (that came with my system), interposer and the securing component

Step 15 – Plug in the HDD caddy in the system and fasten the screws. From this point, its just a reverse process of putting things back in place (palm rest, screws, rear caps and the back cover)

Step 16 – BIOS – now shows the second HDD !

Step 17 – Window Shows the second HDD!

Total time taken from start to finish (including taking photos..etc) -  60 mins!
So, there you go.. you now have a second HDD in your laptop.. hope this pictorial helps!

What if you want to use you CD/DVD drive ?
Well, I have ordered  a eSATA/USB to SATA cable. Using this cable, I can use my CD/DVD drive as an external driver (on the rare occasions that I use it!)

5 comments | February 27th, 2010 at 07:35pm

Dell Inspiron 1420 upgraded from Intel 3945ABG to 4965AGN

Well, we have a Dell Inspiron 1420 [did i mention that before? :)]………. and when we purchased it back in Nov ’07, it came with an Intel 3945ABG WiFi card. The Intel 3945ABG card supports speeds of upto 54 Mbps (802.11g). Its good for accessing the internet, but its slow when you do file transfers between nodes on the local network.

So.., over the past week, upgraded our home network…which involved:
1. Replacing my old D-Link DI-524 router with an 802.11n router
2. And replacing the WiFi Card on the laptop with an 802.11n capable card (Intel 4965AGN WiFi Link card).

Linksys WRT600N Router

For #1, I purchased a Linksys WRT600N router — which is a wireless-N gigabit dual-band router, with storage link — which means, you can connect a USB drive to it, and that drive would be available on your network! (kind of like network attached storage – NAS). So, now, my 750GB Seagate external drive is plugged into it, and all its partitions are now accessible wirelessly as a shared folders!

Intel 4965AGN mini-express card

For #2, here is what I did …

• Confirmed with the Dell tech support that my laptop was indeed upgradeable.
• Purchased a Intel 4965AGN mini-express card. Now, here is the thing – you can buy this card from dell.com – which would cost you around $80+tax+shipping, or you can get it from any third party website. I got it from buy.com (or amazon.com), where it was available for around $33 shipped! (yes… thats how dell rips you!)
• The WiFi card on the Dell Inspiron 1420 is below the keyboard. So, you need to remove the keyboard. There is a Service Manual on the dell website which tells you how to replace the WiFi Card. It was pretty simple. In some laptops of other brands (or other dell models), the card is at the bottom of the laptop and is much easier to access.
• Briefly, here is how you do it:
  • Shutdown you laptop, remove the batteries and ground yourself. Once the battery is remove, press the power button on the laptop to ground the motherboard of your laptop.
  • Remove the Keyboard hinge cover using a plastic scribe (no screws to remove here, its all held with tabs and notches).
  • Once the hinge is off, unscrew the two screws which secure the keyboard, and lift the keyboard gently since the keyboard connector is still connected to the motheboard.
  • Rotate the keyboard connector latch (blue colored in my case) towards the front of the computer to disconnect the keyboard cable from the keyboard connector on the mother board.
  • Once the above is done, the keyboard is free. Now, you should be able to see the existing WiFi card in the mini-express slot.
  • In my case, there was one screw which was securing the card to the system board. I just unscrewed it and the card popped up at a 40 degree angle. I could easily remove the card out of the slot. I had to then remove the two antenna cables that connect to the card. Its simple – just gently pull it apart.
  • Now, one interesting thing is, the old 3495ABG card had two anntenna connectors, but the new 4965AGN card has 3 antenna connectors. You need to use all three to make full use of the Wireless N capabilities. It would still work with two anntennas connected, but the performance won’t be “the” best.
  • Luckily for me, the Dell Inspiron 1420 had a third unused antenna cable (grey color).
  • So, I connected the three antenna cables/wires to the new card (white, black and grey), and then plugged back the new card in.
  • Fixed all components back.
  • Started the system, installed the drivers for the new card.
  • As simple as that. The entire thing took around 15 mins.

So, now I have a wireless-N (draft-N) network running in my house. Performance is much better when it comes to file transfers or watching movies streamed wirelessly from the attached harddisk.

In theory, you should be able to do this on most of the laptops with intel chipsets and core duo processors (except HP laptops). Do confirm it with the laptop manufacturer and make sure your BIOS is updated!

3 comments | April 12th, 2008 at 11:17pm

Dell – Hell – Boing Boing feed on Bloglines…

Here we go….. One more Dell Laptop blows up, and the entire blog-sphere is buzzed about it. But what caught my attention was this post from the Boing Boing’s feed on bloglines!…

The post ends with some dell bashing. But whats interesting is, immediately after the basing, you find a Dell ad!! :D

Click to Zoom

Well, all I can say is……. its a very realistic demonstration of context sensitive RSS ad!! ;)

2 comments | July 28th, 2006 at 07:59pm