I finally got around to upgrading my home desktop computer – a 1st gen Microsoft Surface Studio. When the Studio was first released, it received some amount of criticism for shipping with a few lackluster parts, including an underpowered graphics chipset designed for laptops, as well as a weird hybrid SSD/HDD drive. I easily looked past these limitations because the rest of the computer is a gorgeous 28″ Pixelsense touchscreen that has a wild “zero gravity” hinge that allows you to push the monitor down to a drafting angle. It’s fantastic.

One of the best reviews of the 1st gen here.

However, despite all my gobs of RAM (32GB) – the device is held back by a really curious build choice – a 5400RPM 2TB HDD. It’s a throwback to 2006 that really bogs down any disk-intensive processing. It’s long been on my list to address and I finally got around to it this week.

The hybrid SSD/HDD configuration I mentioned earlier is a strange one. The SSD is invisible to the user and managed by the Studio (supposedly) to improve performance and counteract the utter slowness of the 5400RPM HDD. From the user perspective, you do not see the SSD.

I decided to break this configuration.

Despite likely voiding my warranty, I disassembled the case and replaced the small cache SSD with a 1TB Samsung 970 EVO NVMe M.2 drive and while reinstalling Windows, loaded an NVMe driver which allowed me to see the drive as an optional destination for Windows, thereby allowing me to bypass the odd hybrid arrangement and move Windows to a much higher performing drive.

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Goodbye warranty!

The results are insane.

I used CrystalDiskMark to benchmark drive performance before and after.

Surface Studio drivespeed before.png
BEFORE: horrid read/write speeds thanks to the 5400RPM spinning HDD
studio after.png
AFTER: the NVMe read speed is 25x faster than HDD on the sequential test.

For a small investment of $200, it’s a brand new computer.

Appendix: some great guides I followed:

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