Installing an M.2 internal SSD into an MSI Apache GE72 2QE laptop
In May 2015 I bought an MSI Apache GE72 2QE gaming laptop. I haven’t gamed on it as much as I would have liked, but it’s been pretty solid when I have. I’ve also used it pretty regularly for any personal software development I’ve done. So it has IntelliJ and Android Studio installed; PowerShell and Chocolatey; I set up React-Native on it at one point, and Realm, etc.
Lately the laptop seemed to be taking longer and longer to do pretty normal things, like boot up, open Chrome… uhm pretty much anything really.
I checked the Performance tab of Task Manager and noticed my RAM usage was at about 70%. The laptop comes with 8gb of RAM, and I had never modified it, and 8gb is kind of small now a days.. I checked the laptop’s manual and the Crucial compatibility page and figured what the heck, and I ordered and installed another 8gb stick of RAM, taking me to 16gb.. which made no difference. The laptop performed exactly the same ha; back to the drawing board.
The other thing I thought might be the issue was the laptop comes with a 1tb HDD, which again, had never been modified. Task Manager showed usage almost consistently at 100% so maybe it was time to swap that out for an SSD.
While upgrading the RAM, I noticed 3 screws; 2 said SATA next to them, and the other said Combo. I checked the manual and found that my laptop apparently came with 3 M.2 SSD slots, which I had no idea what that was.

This led me to a lot of googling. I’m still not entirely sure what M.2 is exactly, I just knew that it looked like I should be able to plug an M.2 2280 SSD into that slot #2.
Which led to even more googling about what to buy. What I had been reading made it sound like you couldn’t just buy any ol’ M.2 2280 SSD, plug it in, and it would work. I read warnings about BIOS issues, and maybe you could install it, but not boot from it?
It also seemed like you had to be careful about whether you were buying a PCIe M.2 SSD or an mSATA M.2 SSD? My interpretation was PCIe devices were faster.
And I didn’t understand if my slot supported NVMe, or exactly what NVMe was… It seemed NVMe was what made PCIe 2.0 x2 into x4 (using 4 lanes instead of just 2?) Also it seems PCIe 3.0 is backwards compatible to 2.0…
Eventually I just decided I’d buy something I thought would work and give it a shot.
I purchased a Samsung 960 EVO Series 250GB PCIe NVMe M.2 Internal SSD. After getting some help from Newegg’s thing where they let you ask other owners, I was able to install and boot from it! Here’s some key things to know if you’re looking for help on doing this:
- When removing the bottom from the laptop, on my machine they put a “Warranty Sticker Void if Tampered” sticker over a screw head. I could not figure out WTF was going on until I realized that sticker was actually covering a screw… dumb moment on my part.
- After I installed the drive, I thought I’d boot the machine like normal and just make sure it saw the drive. Through Device Manager, I knew Windows saw it (you can also use Samsung Magician, which is great), and I probably could have formatted and used it via Disk Manager.. but it had been a long time since I’d added a drive and I forgot you had to format it before Windows would let you use it, so I was a little worried I was having issues… but everything was actually fine.
- This is the most important info in this post: You really don’t have to adjust much in the BIOS. The only thing is I had to change the boot order to get it to boot to my bootable USB flash drive so I could install Windows to the SSD, but YOU HAVE TO REMOVE THE HDD FOR THE INSTALL PROCESS TO SSD TO BE SUCCESSFUL. There might be a way to get it to install to the SSD without having to remove the HDD… but I know this method worked. (this is where I needed the hint from the Newegg owners).
- Once you get Windows installed to the SSD, you can set your BIOS boot order back to default, and plug your HDD back in. I booted to the flash drive one more time to use the disk management feature to wipe the HDD, then I booted to the SSD, and used Disk Manager to format the 1tb HDD and I’m using it for extra space, video games, etc.
Parts of this post might not be very clear; please let me know if you have trouble following this when upgrading your own machine. My intent in putting this out there is to make the upgrade process easier for anyone else! Below is a screenshot of my latest performance benchmark using Samsung Magician; it may not be terrific but it’s sooooo much faster than what I had!

