How to fit larger SSD's in the cube i9

[Bonnom]

The cube has a m.2 2242 ssd. This means that the maximum size of a ssd is 42mm tall.

Unfortunately there aren’t many manufacturers that make SSD’s in that format. Luckily I found a way to fit a regular 2280 in the device. It is a bit of a crappy solution but it works!

First of all it is better to buy a proper 2242 ssd than this method.

I bought a m.2 extender flex cable from ebay. I opened the cube i9 and pullex out a ssd. At first I tried to fit a ssd horizontally in the small space below the m.2 connectors. The extender part that went on the the socket was a bit to thick and I had to break pieces of it off to make it fit.

I was able to close the tablet with a 80mm ssd in this position but it was really hard and the casing would not 100% fit.

Then I tried a longer cable and taped the ssd on the back of the battery vertically next to motherboard. This worked better than trying to fit it horizontally but when the back was put back the cube i9 had a noticeble bubble at the place of the ssd.

At last I tried to placing the ssd horizontally on the back of the battery. This worked a lot better. The back fits nicely on the cube i9 without much trouble. Also the backplate of the cube i9 doesn’t show any noticeble flex. When booted from the ssd the screen doesn’t show any artifact from pressure.

This mod might make the cube i9 more vulnerable to damage because it is less able to flex with pressure. Therefore I don’t recommend this mod for people that want to fit a regular ssd of 512gb or less in this device. Just buy a transcend TDlS512GMTS400 from Amazon.

If someone wants to fit a 1tb drive in this ssd this is indeed the only option. But I would recommend to try to stick with a 512gb ssd.

This mod could still be used by someone if they want to use a high performance NVMe drive. There are however a couple of problems:

• The regular m.2 ssd slot on the cube i9 is a sata III port and can’t use the high speeds of the NVMe drives. It is unknown if the other m.2 slot is a full pci express 3.0 4x slot. 
• The bios is unlikely to support a NVMe as a bootable device. (Can someone confirm this?)

 

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[D MacDonald]

Very cool.

[Miguel]

In the photo I see you nmade a kind of thermal mod on the cpu. what did you use and what was the results on improving?

[Bonnom]

A bit off topic but I used and bought from aliexpress:

• GD900 thermal paste from aliexpress
• Coppershim 10pcs 20mm*20mm*1mm
• Thermal pad 100*100*1mm

I bought the GD900 paste for a much lower prices than currently is available ($5 now $1.70 when I bought). The paste is really good. For 5 dollars you get a lot and you probably never going to use most of those syringes.

The improvements are really worth it. The tablet was overheating without mod and after mod around 60 Celcius.
There was only one problem, a sensor on the motherboard got hotter and the tablet was thermal throttling anyway.
I’m working on a guide to disable the sensor.

[Mohsin]

HI All,

can anybody conform about this SSD , Will this fit/Work in the 2nd port.

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Free-shipping-256GB-M-2-solid-state-drive-with-256bMB-Cache-NGFF-M-2-interface-SSD/32460219138.html?spm=2114.30010308.3.119.ZJLa4B&ws_ab_test=searchweb201556_10,searchweb201602_3_9993_10037_10034_507_10032_10020_10017_10021_10022_10009_10008_10018_10019,searchweb201603_9&btsid=740bbc3a-b501-46ff-ac2b-ef4c0a209889

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