Installation
An ideal use case
A recently-purchased Surface Pro 8, with a medium spec that included a paltry 256GB drive, will be the immediate beneficiary of this upgrade. Its owner quickly filled 213 of the ~230GB available. Performance has noticeably degraded as a result. In a sadly too frequent and shameful fashion, Microsoft offers no option to upgrade from a 256GB drive to 512GB or 1TB without also increasing ram and cpu specs – both of which are of course not at all user-replaceable, forcing most customers (any who don’t or can’t envisage self-upgrading) into expensive unwanted or unnecessary upgrades.
Out with the old
To Microsoft’s credit, however, the NVMe slot could not be easier to access – a paperclip and you’re in. Sadly, they chose a T4 screw to retain the drive, nothing any iFixIt kit can’t solve, but the unnecessary complication this presents compared to the almost ubiquitous Philips alternative would be a mark against Microsoft – were this a review of the Surface Pro 8 we are using here.
Your mileage may vary depending on your destination device – these days most of the products you’d be installing this type of storage into don’t make it too hard. It’s generally feasible for a complete novice to perform the operation in very little time.
Before we remove the existing 256GB Microsoft-branded drive provided with the tablet, we used imaging software to copy the current contents onto an external USBC storage. We then tested the outgoing drive performance with CrystalDiskMark, both in its current 96% full state, and again after emptying more than half the drive. More on this later!
In with the new
With the MP600 Mini safely screwed down, we replace the cover and boot to our imaging software on a USB key and copy the contents back over to the new drive.
Hey presto, job done ✅
The computer boots right back into the state we left it around 20 minutes ago – it couldn’t be easier.
On to Performance! Does the Corsair MP600 Mini deliver?
