Xbox Series X SSD Replacement & Cloning Experiments

this video is sponsored by jlc pcb the xbox series xn series s consoles both contain a removable ssd but is that ssd replaceable is it something we can just clone all the info onto another ssd and it'll work fine can we swap them between consoles those are all the questions we're going to find out in this video so let's do this i've got a donor xbox series x console with a known good ssd that i'm going to swap into this xbox series x console and see if it works straight away or if we need to do a software update or maybe it doesn't work at all so first i'm going to harvest this ssd out of this series x motherboard there we go now one of the unfortunate things about these ssds is they're buried all the way down on this bottom motherboard you have to basically take the entire console apart to get to this ssd i've already got this one taken partially apart so let's get it apart the rest of the way and get down to that drive [Music] once we have this middle metal chassis off we have access to the ssd just going to use my pick and go around and unlock some of these little tabs and there we have the ssd i am going to mark this ssd to make sure that i don't get confused which one goes in this console and which one came for the donor and now i'll just wiggle this one back and forth to pull it out it is interesting they're using ssds from different companies this one is western digital this one is solid state storage technology corporation so now we're going to put this one into this xbox series x then i'll put it back together and see what happens so we've got it back together just enough to test this series x so now i'm going to hook it up to the tv turn it on and see what happens okay so once again we have the ssd from a donor board that did not come in this xbox series x let's turn it on and see what happens [Music] okay so this one won't even power fully on now but is that because of the ssd or is that some other problem it seems kind of strange that it would do that with only the ssd replaced so i guess one way i could test it is just put the other ssd back in and see if it starts up so now i will take out the ssd from the donor board and install the ssd that originally came with this xbox and now let's try it so now i have everything set up exactly the same the only thing that's different with this setup is it has the original ssd in it so let's see if it'll power on now oh we have immediate power the fan's running yeah it's already ready to go so unfortunately it looks like with the series x you can't just swap over another ssd even if it's from another series x but my next question is can we clone them i'm going to try that next but first i'm going to get this ssd updated and then we'll clone this one onto this donor ssd so we'll take out the ssd that we know works in this series x console and we'll clone this ssd onto this one i'm going to be using this sabrint cloning tool i got this off of amazon i'll leave my affiliate link down in the description if you'd like to buy one of these for yourself but let's try it out and see if it works this is actually the first time i've even used this thing so let's see if it works and the source is slot a the target is slot b they're marked right here now this specific cloner doesn't have holes for this small of a drive as right now you can't buy this size of drive with a one terabyte i don't know for sure if that's the only reason i'm just going to use a piece of foam and that will just help them stay down tightly there we go i'm just going to flip it over power it on shows up drive a and drive b and now we're going to clone now i don't know how long this process will take it could take quite a while so we'll come back once it's done then get it installed back into the series x okay so that only took like 20 minutes or so actually it could have been less than 20 minutes i'm not sure i started my timer and came back 20 minutes later and it was done so let's get this donor drive that we just cloned this drive from into this xbox series x and see if it'll work now okay so we should know pretty quickly whether or not this is going to work when i took just the donor ssd straight from the donor motherboard onto this motherboard it wouldn't power on the fan didn't turn on none of that worked so when i plug this power cable in we should get a fan spin we should get the controller buzzing we should get all of that so let's see if that happens controller buzz the fan is not spinning so i'm not sure about that let's plug a power cable in oh here we go fan spin that's good news and we have power what do we have on the screen everything looks exactly the same as it did with this original ssd so that's great news that means that there is nothing on the ssd that is key to the motherboard that makes it so you can't replace them now that we know that let's try a brand new ssd that has no xbox software on it let's clone this ssd onto this ssd and then see if that'll work so once again this is the ssd from the donor board that we've cloned from the original ssd so the original ssd was cloned onto the donor ssd so now we're going to clone the donor ssd onto a brand new ssd now as i said earlier this physical size of ssd is not available at least at the time that i'm publishing this video it's not available in the one terabyte version so the closest i could get was this sabrint ssd it's a 2242 which is obviously longer we'll worry about that in a little bit but first we need to clone from here onto here and we're going to go from the source which is this donor ssd to the target so this enclosure comes with these little rubber uh hold downs you just push right in like that obviously this one doesn't have one because this enclosure is not made for that small of an ssd since they don't sell them anywhere at least not easily to get and now we'll turn it on it does recognize both and now it's time to clone oh it won't clone i wonder what that means i hooked this up to my computer i initialized it so now let's see if it will work okay good so far oh still nothing so unfortunately this is not gonna clone to this new ssd as far as i know the new one is compatible but clearly there's something that's not working right there so unfortunately we won't be able to do the test where we check and see if a cloned new drive will work i expect over the coming months and years these types of drives will become very available and we'll be able to get whatever size we want so i'm hoping that when that happens then we'll be able to just clone directly to a brand new ssd but this video isn't going to end there i thought it'd be fun to take one of the ssds from the xbox series x put it in the series s and just see if that happens to work before we do that though i want to tell you about today's sponsor jlc pcb jlcpcb is the best place to get your pcbs manufactured quickly efficiently and accurately and they also offer fast shipping and delivery times to the united states now one of the problems many people have when it comes to custom manufactured pcbs is how to get them designed well jlcpcb has their very own design tool called easy eda it's a free and easy to use pcb design tool right now jlc pcb has a monthly 24 smt coupon for their customers so you can design and make and then trust easy eda and jlc pcb to manufacture your custom circuit boards thanks again to jlc pcb for sponsoring this video now let's get this xbox series x one terabyte ssd installed into the xbox series s with the 500 gigabyte and here is the ssd on the xbox series s [Music] and just to be clear i don't expect this to work but i couldn't make this video and not at least try and now that we got it installed let's put this back together enough to test and see if it happens to work so i've got this series s back together enough to test let's see if it'll turn on okay the controller buzzed oh it turns on and then turns right back off just like the series x when the wrong ssd was installed on that so unfortunately we can't swap in a new larger ssd into the series s at least right now at some point that'll probably be possible but unfortunately if you want to replace your ssd you'll have to clone another ssd from another xbox series s thank you again to jlc pcb for sponsoring this video if you are interested in learning more about custom pcb manufacturing go to jlcpcb.com thank you so much for hanging out with me today and watching this video and i hope you have a good one

Channel: TronicsFix

Views: 366,945

Rating: 4.908278 out of 5

Keywords: tronicsfix, tronicsfix xbox series x, xbox series x, xbox series x ssd, xbox series x ssd replacement, xbox series s ssd

Id: nyKUVmJmAGY

Length: 12min 20sec (740 seconds)

Published: Fri May 28 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/b3l0kk]

Comments I left on the video....

I have bought the exact same model Western Digital SSD that the Series X & S models use. Cloning them does work but you can't just pop in a blank one or formatted one to NTFS with a GPT Partition. You can't even get into recovery mode. It turns on and shuts off just like in your video. You can't clone from one and put it another.. it just does not work.. even though I have the ones that Microsoft uses. There is an extra partition on the original SSD that is unformatted. I have no clue what it is. There is defiantly something stopping us from just charging out the SSD. Its not going to be as easy as the Xbox One. Modern Vintage Gamer is right about something custom that may be unique to each Console that it sees on the SSD to boot. I am sure someone will figure out the method to run a script to get around this and format/partition the SSD. Your only option right now is to make a clone of your SSD and keep it safe in case your original SSD goes up.

[u/b3l0kk]

Small update: I have tried cloning the SSD's to other brands that have the same specs as the original SSD's and have the same forum factor. They are manufactured by Samsung, Toshiba and Sk hynix. It will not clone at all. These SSD's will only clone to the same WD SN530 SSD's.