Inside Toshiba Portege R30-A – disassembly, internal photos and upgrade options

Toshiba Portege R30-A is a hefty little fellow hasn’t got much to offer, mainly due to his price point, we can’t be too picky. Yet, it will be interesting to see what the notebook keeps inside.

You can gather more information about its price and availability here: http://amzn.to/1SVBw5a

1. Opening the service cover

It’s pretty easy actually – it just needs a few screws to be removed. It comes off easily, but make sure you’ve removed the battery, by releasing the levers, first. It’s rated at 5800 mAh and made by SANYO Energy.

Anyway, you will find all you need to replace or upgrade at that point. There are two RAM chip slots and one of them is taken by a 4GB chip (in our case). It’s manufactured by Samsung. Interestingly enough, the HDD is manufactured by HGST (or Western Digital) and it’s not in-house made, which is a thing we see most of the times with Toshiba notebooks. We’ve also found out that the drive inside has a 500GB storage but tends to be on the speedier side as it works at 7200 rpm.

2. Taking the bottom part completely off

In order to do so, you should unscrew all the bolts around the bottom piece and it just falls off easily. We found that the CPU (since it’s part of the Haswell family) is on a BGA socket and gets cooled with a vent that isn’t connected with a heat pipe, but instead pushes cool air to the heat pipe. You will see in our full review of the Toshiba Portege R30-A if that’s an effective strategy.

The optical drive is also easy to detach and you can swap it with a bracket for a 2.5-inch HDD for additional storage and, unfortunately, that’s the only option for expanding the storage. But, of course, this is a budget business model and the M.2 SSD slot isn’t a standard option. You can browse through our M.2 SSD compatibility list for more information about models that support NGFF storage form factor.

Author: Rossen Pandev

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judal57

10 años hace

thermal design = epic fail! The pch chip behind the RAM ?? the fan far from the vents of the heatsink ?? WTF

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Leonid

8 meses hace

Responder a  judal57

Thermal design is in fact very interesting. Instead of transferring heat (heat pipes are heavy!), they transfer cool air that weighs next to nothing. The bottom part of the laptop has plastic partitions that form an air duct that forces the air to go directly into the fins of the heatsink. That saves a lot of weight.

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