Running Out Of Space - Upgrading the Wind and 1000h

It is said wisely by Evan Esar that "A family is a social unit where the Father is concerned with parking space, the children with outer space, and the Mother with closet space". What he failed to see was that there is also the geek that is concerned with Hard Drive space. Perhaps if he were alive he would tack this onto the end of his observation.

In the world of the tiny, where screens, keyboards and mousepads are somewhat shrunk - so too are their technical counterparts - CPUs, RAM and Hard Drives. Most of the time this is inline with keeping the cost of these mini machines down to remain within the market segment's desired price range.

Many pundits when faced with the miniscule 4GB (or God forbid 2GB) of non-upgradable Flash memory on the original Eee PC 701 machine opted to void the warranty and mod their machines using the mini PCIe connector and an internally mounted USB Drive. Nowadays, and I say that with tongue-in-cheek, we have 2.5" SATA HDDs and Solid State Drives in our machines which are easily upgradable and have a much higher storage capacity. The Wind and 1000h both come with these drives at varying capacities - with the most common being 80GB. This level of storage is a world of difference from the first netbooks and allows for all the documents you could ever read as well as a mid-size music library and some photos. However, as per the old adage apparently its NOT ENOUGH.

Patrons of the MSI Wind and EeeUser forums have demonstrated their insatiable desire for more and have upgraded their Winds and Eees to astronomical proportions.

MastahOneTrack gives this great yet brief video guide on how to upgrade your Wind Main Storage Drive and RAM. It is so easy I really believe anyone could do it. This is testament to MSI's wonderful motherboard design. Bare in mind you will have to reinstall Windows using USB or an external optical drive after the fact. c_henry from the MSI Wind forums opted for a Samsung HM500LI in his U100 Wind. That's a 500Gig Hard Drive proven to work in a tiny machine. What about voiding your warranty? Amazingly MSI has been relatively relaxed, or naive, about customers voiding their warranty when exploratively opening their machines as you can see here.

MSI Wind upgrade video guide

The 1000h is similarly easy to upgrade as Zeavott shows in this informative video. The Wind probably takes the cake for the simple-to-upgrade moniker as the 1000h requires you to screw your HDD into a metal cage - although admittedly they are both relatively easy to upgrade.

Asus Eee PC 1000h upgrade video guide

There is still much debate about whether HDDs or SSD are preferable. There are pros and cons to each - HDDs give the longest lifetime and byte for your buck, but SSDs are silent and have no moving parts so are kinder to your battery and less likely to suffer from impact damage. Its really down to personal preference.

Looking for parts down-under? Try Pricespy in Australia or New Zealand to find a retailer near you offering competitive prices on 2.5" SATA Hard Drives. Poms can use Dooyo and Americanites PriceWatch.

Still too lazy or scared to try the above mods and running out of space quickfast? UMPC Portal blogged on a program WinDirStat that gives you a visual representation of where your precious migs and megs have gone and lets you recover some of that unneccesarily occupied space.