Microsoft has started shipping its all-in-one PC targeted at creative users and even as the Surface Studio begins making its way to a lucky few, the folks at iFixit have taken apart the device and reveal that its disk is upgradable.
The iFixit team, true to its style, picked apart the Surface Studio from Microsoft and revealed that the PC generates a lot of heat, which is why the device packs in several vents.
"The Surface Studio is just full of hot air. Literally. And Microsoft had to pipe that air out somewhere. The Studio features acres of air vents, a beefy heat sink, and two fans-one each for the CPU and GPU. Plus, the power supply has its own internal fan. It looks like Microsoft is getting quite a bit cooler than its late 2000s "I'm a PC" reputation," notes the iFixit team in a blog post.
The team disclosed that the Surface Studio has plenty of soldered-down parts, as well as a custom motherboard. Microsoft has obviously designed the PC keeping the fact that in mind that it is not serviceable by the end-user. As a result, the Surface Studio's CPU and RAM are all soldered to the motherboard.
So basically, if one buys the base model with 8 GB of RAM, rest assured he will not be able to upgrade the same. However, even though the memory cannot be bumped up one could increase the disk size, one can add a bigger disk as the storage is upgradable.
Upgradable Storage
The Surface Studio, as revealed by the teardown, apparently uses a hybrid storage system. It deploys an SSD in conjunction with a bigger spinning disk instead of using a hybrid drive that is integrated.
The device packs in a standard SanDisk 64GB Z400s M.2 SSD along with the standard SATA hard drive. Both of these are replaceable.
"If you happen to have a couple flash storage modules and a hot air rework station lying around, the SSD controller should happily take up to four NAND flash devices," notes the iFixit team.
So thanks to the presence of two empty solder pads on the Surface Studio (two of the four slots have 32 GB chips each), one can upgrade the storage of the PC easily.
How Did The Surface Studio Score In Reparability?
The Surface Studio garnered a score of 5 out of 10 in repairability. This score is not bad considering the Microsoft Surface Book and 15-inch MacBook Pro Touch Bar 2016 received a 1 out of 10!
