Last year I managed to get hold of an eeePC 702 8GB model, great little machine. Only issue was storage: with an 8GB solid state hard drive, it was great for mobility, but after installing Windows XP, you wind up with a grand total of 2GB free. The first thing I tried was adding an 8GB SD card into the built in reader, but it still wasn't enough. Fast forward to this years Christmas sales, where I managed to pick up a 16GB USB flash drive for £13.99 off play.com.
I remembered a mod I saw on some random site, that I haven't been able to locate since. It detailed a mod where a stripped down flash drive was housed in the same compartment as the inbuilt SSD, and connected by running a USB extension cable through the chassis, and soldering directly onto the left hand USB port, rendering it useless externally, but effectively adding the drive as internal memory. Seemed like a great idea!
I started off by disassembling the flash drive:
As you can see, it came apart fairly easy, into 3 main parts. The actual drive was clipped into a plastic holder, which was slightly trickier, but still relatively easy.
The idea of using a flash drive as internal storage looked like a great idea at first glance, but after a moment of consideration, I was a little dubious. Even with a write cycle limit of 300,000+, it still doesn't sound like it would last too long if it were used as anything other than casual storage. But what's the point in wondering. Short of putting the Windows swap file on it, there's not much chance of hitting that any time soon. And even if it did happen to break that limit on say 30% of the entire drive after a year or so use, it would be about time to replace the entire laptop.... And also its any excuse to bring out the soldering iron.
So, what's next. It felt about time to disassemble the eeePC. Scary stuff. But it was surprisingly easy. And its not like its made cheaply, or anything like that. Its just so SIMPLE. I remember trying to disassemble my old Thinkpad T22 when its HDD went up in blue smoke. It was a mess in there. All the different layers of components and plastic casing interweaving and crossing, it felt like it would snap in half at any moment. But not this one. 8 screws, and you're in.
As you can see, three main chips are clearly visible underneath the metal cover. Theres no heat sinks as 
such, all the chips make direct contact with the metal cover that's below the keyboard, which seems to be enough to cool these. Which is pretty damn impressive. Ok, so its not exactly a powerhouse when it comes to speed etc, but its still a major feat of engineering to have all this working full speed with next to no cooling.
After lifting up the motherboard, the USB connector is clearly visible. After preparing the USB extension cable as such:
There is just enough space to wind the wires though from the SSD compartment to the left-hand USB port, and a quick soldering job later its time to test it.
The first time I tested this config, it was still in the state above, with the power supply plugged in, and a USB mouse, for minimal input. And no luck. Windows didn't see the drive, and there didn't even seem to be any power getting to the drive. Crud.
After much a-scratching of the head, I realized I'd actually soldered the wires onto the USB port in the wrong order.In fact they were exactly backwards. Great. Luckily it only took around 10 minutes to fix, and lo and behold, a permanent 16GB drive! Finally.
Happy as could be, I re-assembled the tiny machine, for once not ending up with a left over screw. Quick test boot up, still working perfectly. Then time to replace the bay door:
Ah. the drive and extension connector are too thick to allow the bay door to close! How! After the previous 'problem' this was far too close to beat me now.
Solution! After a little fiddling I realized the drive itself was a perfect thickness. The problem was the connector on the extension cable side. The metal surrounding this connector was far too thick for the space.
To be safe, I tried it out on a spare extension cable. I used pliers to remove the metal casing, and then tested the cable. It still connected the flash drive to my main PC, no problems. Who needs grounding hey?
So, a quick delicate struggle later, and we have a modified connector, with the flash drive all snug in the bay, seen right. It still sticks out a little bit, but I thought I'd give it a shot at closing the bay, as there really wasn't anything else I could do to reduce the size of the drive. And what do you know, brute force wins out again. The door bulges out a little, but how often do you look at the bottom of the laptop. Its secure and that's all that matters.
One quick note. After running steam off the drive, as well as installing Visual Studio, and then copying data across from the network drive, all at the same time, the drive suddenly disappeared. Unscrewing the bay, it was HOT. Not just warm, HOT. Now since then, I haven't been able to reproduce the problem, and it was fine after cooling down (using an air duster for assistance). So basically, as long as you're not doing numerous sustained read/writes at the same time, it should be fine.
Another quick and final note! Most windows applications will not allow you to install them to a removable drive, which kind of destroys the point of having extra storage. A quick workaround that I've found to get round this is to go into disk management, and mount the drive as a folder on the SSD. While windows doesn't add the remaining space on the flash drive to the free space on the SSD, it works perfectly for installing anything from then on.
Right, thats the end of my first documented hardware hack, more to come hopefully, and I hope that if anyone does read this, they find it least entertaining. Have fun. Oh yeah, and if you do this, I'm not responsible for anything you break, set on fire, destroy in a black hole, yadda yadda yadda. Later!
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