Lately, I've noticed a performance decline in my Shield TV pro. I've been meaning to do a factory reset, since I haven't since I've owned it and it's been through several updates. Then I heard about the SSD replacement option. I figured, if I'm doing a factory reset, I'll do a disk replacement at the same time. So...

I started off by following the many guides, and trying with an old 250GB Samsung 840 Pro I had laying around. Try as I might, I ran into a ton of issues at every step. I'd invested a few hours and wasn't making enough progress. I said screw it; I'll buy a 500GB EVO and a cheap disk cloner on Amazon (same-day) and try my luck there. Welp, disk cloners suck. At least that's my experience with the cheap ones.

I decided to scrap the guides and the cloner idea, and focus directly on cloning the disk using the tools I know work... and the process, as it turns out, is stupid simple.

Started by using my fingernails to get under the corners of the plastic shell. This was really easy.

Carefully remove the tape on the two wire bundles on top of the SSHD. Then unplug them. (CAREFULLY, CAREFULLY).

Unscrew the T6 screw and remove it, along with the retaining clip.

Use a plastic wedge tool to (CAREFULLY) lift the sata ribbon from the SSHD. It's glued on there pretty well. I didn't unplug it from the board.

Slowly lift the SSHD (CAREFULLY) and remove the Sata connector from the drive. Then slide the drive out.

Boot a PC with a Linux live boot (like Knoppix)

Now, the cloner I bought wasn't completely useless, since I could use both SATA slots to mount the drives without digging out my SATA-USB adapters. Only problem is that now they're on the same bus, so it's slower. No big deal. If you have two seperate controllers, it'll take less time to transfer.

Connect the SSHD and fdisk -l (it was /dev/sdb)

Connect the EVO SSD and fdisk -l (it was /dev/sdc)

Then, one command...

dd if=/dev/sdb bs=512 conv=sync,noerror | pv | dd of=/dev/sdc

Insert your new SSD and reassemble following the same steps, only backward. Boom! Works.

The interface is significantly snappier, load times are almost negligible, reboot is about 45 seconds. It's absolutely worth the effort. It's like a whole new device.

https://m.imgur.com/gallery/QcVWD94

Oh, and that 250GB 840 Pro is now adoptive storage on my Shield TV 2017 in the bedroom. A nice upgrade there as well.