Hey everyone and welcome back to Joey’s Retro Handhelds. I’m Joey, and today we’re going to be looking at how to upgrade your Asus ROG Ally’s solid state drive to a larger one, without losing your data, by cloning.
You’d want to do this if you just finished setting up your Ally in a perfect manner, but grabbed a sweet deal on a larger drive like I did and don’t want to have to start from scratch. So some pre-requisites so that you know if this video is for you. The first thing you need is an ROG Ally of course, so let’s check that off. The next thing you need is a new solid state drive. Now, unless you want to massacre your ROG Ally, you want to buy an M.2 2230 SSD. The best one on the market right now is the Western Digital SN740, and the size is up to you, but I have a 2TB here. I’ll leave links in the description to everything we talk about today, and where you can buy them if you want – for reference, I bought this 2TB for $130 US dollars shipped to Canada.
The next thing you’re going to need, for the purposes of this specific guide, is an M.2 enclosure. This is essentially something that you can put your brand new drive into, and connect it to the ROG Ally, so we can clone it using software we’ll talk about in a minute. Again, link in the description to mine – it was $18 US dollars. Technically, this isn’t a necessary step, as from what I understand there are ways you can do the clone to other types of drives if you have the space – external hard drive, SD card, whatever. And if you have that know how and can navigate it, then go right ahead – but for me, and what I found to be the easiest and simple way, was to grab this enclosure and it just connects to my Ally. It also does USB-C to USB-C so you don’t exactly need a USB hub or dock, but I’d suggest one as you’ll want to keep your Ally charged during this. The last major benefit of having an enclosure like this is you can now use the original 512GB SSD as an external hard drive. Keep it connected to your dock, throw some games on there and off you go. The alternative is selling it, but I doubt there’s a large market for something like this, especially at 512GB.
To avoid issues I’ve seen popup, remove your MicroSD card from the Ally. Seriously, just do it, it can cause headaches during this whole process. Just put it to the side for now.
Lastly, you just need a size 0 phillips head screwdriver and I’d advise a spudger, or a credit card, but something to open the case with. I have my set here from iFixIt, which has everything you need.
Software wise, there is one thing that is recommended to do and that’s disable Bitlocker. Bitlocker is basically meant for data protection and encrypts all your files and causes some issues when cloning. I also don’t find it necessary for a gaming device. Now, I’ve read both ways – I’ve seen examples with no issues if Bitlocker is on and I’ve seen the opposite. I like to go with a cautious approach, so I’m going to disable Bitlocker. It’s just the way I’ve always done it and I’ve never had an issue, so why change now? So head to the start menu, type in Bitlocker and you should see Manage Bitlocker. Select that and then under your C drive if you have multiple drives, you want to turn off Bitlocker. This process does take some time depending on the storage you’ve used and files. It absolutely could take a few hours, mine actually only took an hour, so keep it plugged in – but we can still do the next part in the mean time. It’ll be up to you on if you want to enable Bitlocker after we’ve swapped drives and it’s the same process that we just did, except you would select turn on Bitlocker. If you’re choosing not to disable Bitlocker at all before cloning, you’re doing so at your own risk and outside the scope of this guide.
Now, while Bitlocker is decrypting, we can do other things. Moving onto cloning software, and we’re going to be using a program called Macrium Reflect. It’s a powerful tool that does a lot of things for imaging, but our purposes, we’ll just be cloning directly from the Ally onto the new drive. It has a free trial for a month, so more than enough time for what we need. Head to the link in the description or just macrium.com, and click Get Started – Home. Click Download 30 day trial. Enter your email and click the download button. Check your email for the download link and then download and open the executable. Leave everything as default and click download. You might have Macrium popup itself, but if not, head to your downloads folder and you should see a Macrium folder. Inside, click the one that says home setup. Click next when you get the Macrium popup, then next again with the setup wizard, accept the terms and then click next for the 30 day free trial. Register if you want, then next on the setup screen, and then install. Click Finish when it’s all done and if Bitlocker is done decrypting, restart your Ally. Otherwise wait for it to finish, then restart.
Put your new SSD in the enclosure and connect it to the Ally. It’s fairly straight forward – just pop the drive into the slot and turn the holding screw to keep it tight. Mine also had some cooling pads too that don’t hurt to use. Open up Disk Management and let’s just make sure it shows. You’ll likely get a popup like I did about initializing disk, leave it as GPT and click ok. There it is, we’re all set – mine is Disk 1. Let’s open Macrium Reflect – I did it via the search menu, or find it in your program files. Now you’ll see your drives here, and in the case of my Ally, I see my previous drive as Disk 1. But Disk 2 is the new drive. You can tell by the partitions or the size. Click the Ally drive, Click Clone this disk under the Ally 500gb drive. Under select a disk to clone to, click disk 2. Now click copy partitions and you want to click the extend option. Mine automatically extended the C drive, but if you click the C drive then layout on the right, you can make sure the bar is extended all the way so that it’s going to use all your space for that partition. Now just click next. We aren’t scheduling it, so next again. This page just gives a summary of what we’re doing, click finish. Then click ok and it’ll run. Just leave the PC now, don’t do anything, don’t touch it, let it do the clone. This will take some time, so go find those loved ones as usual and spend some time with them.
Okay, now that our drive is ready to go, let’s open up the Ally. Make sure the Ally is completely powered off of course. There’s six screws on the back and the bottom middle screw is shorter than the rest, so just keep that in mind for when we put it back together. Unscrew all six, and now we need to get the case off. Use your spudger, credit card or anything you sort of pry the cases apart from each other – it’s helpful to start near the triggers like I do. Then just work your way around until it comes off.
Now, some people choose to unplug the battery here to be completely safe. I won’t personally be doing so, just ground yourself before touching anything and don’t puncture the battery and you should be fine. Lift the black flap up and unscrew the lone screw holding the hard drive in. Pull it out and put it to the side. Now, grab your new hard drive and just slide it in – make sure you’re aligning it the same way. Put the screw back in. Now we can put the case back on, which just snaps together. Then screw in all six screws remembering that the middle bottom screw is the short one.
Plug in your device just to be safe and turn it on. And we’re done, it boots perfectly and you can see the extra space just waiting to be used.
You should be at the same state you were before the clone.
Hope this guide was helpful to you.
