[Shield Android TV General] kavey:
Hello all

Just wanted to update this thread with my experience upgrading my Nvidia Shield Pro (2015)

I've had my 2015 Shield since it launched and over the last couple of years or so, I found it started to crash every so often, particularly in the summer when it's warmer. Having had the device for 8 years, I figured my SSHD would need replacing and after reading this thread and seeing various videos on YT on how to do this, I took the plunge.

My experience was challenging, but in the end I (touchwood) I have a fully upgraded Shield with a 500GB SSD and it has revitalised one of the best pieces of hardware I've ever owned.

I've put together some notes below with the hope that it may help some others that may be looking to replace their drives.

1. Opening the Shield

This was a fairly simple process - I already had an ifixit kit with pry tools and spudgers, so opening the device was pretty straightfoward

Once open there are three cables which need to be disconnected from the main board - two which are taped to the SSD, one SATA ribbon cable - these are easy to unplug, just make sure the black tab on the retainer for the SATA cable is lifted to allow the cable to come out easily.

As my device is pretty old, I took the opportunity to clean the fan and re-grease the APU with some nice new thermal paste I had from my PC building kit - (another that should help in the summer should the device get warm, but in reality the biggest generator of heat in the device is actually the mechanical SSHD which has now been replaced and the device runs very cool now in comparison)

2. Software

I wanted to image the drive as a priority so looked at the various options for doing this.

If you are doing a straight clone with a 500GB drive, you don't need to mess around with adjusting the lastpart.bin to tweak the partition table, and as 500GB SSDs are pretty cheap these days, didn't seem worth it to get a smaller drive so I stuck with 500GB (most of my media is on NAS, so the Shield has very little stored on it, unless I go on holiday when I might pack the drive with some movies and shows)

Various mentions in this thread suggested doing a straight clone with HDDRawCopy. This has the ability to clone the drive to an image first, and I wanted a more permanent backup in case I needed to repeat the operation in the future, and keeping an image meant I will always have my Widevine keys for Netflix etc. The free version of HDDRawCopy is speed limited to 50MB/s so I looked for something else - I wanted to be able to pull the data from the original drive as fast as possible, 50MB/s would have been 6+ hours!

In the end i ended up using a similar piece of software I found through some searching - https://dmde.com/ as it allowed me to create a split-file image at full drive speed with the ability to directly hexedit sectors in the image (or even directly on a drive if you dare!) should I ever decide to upgrade to a different sized SSD in the future - when cloning to a 500GB drive, the image can be used as-is - but using the raw original image DMDE can create a new image for a different sized drive (using the same process as the othe thread) to write in one go, rather than having to write multiple different parts of the drive in different places etc. Luckily, despite my drive being 8 years old and being left on constantly, I was please to find that DMDE was able to clone the drive perfectly and no bad sectors found, despite lots of recent crashes.

3. Setup

I did not unlock bootloader - I don't understand why this is suggested - if you are cloning the drive on a sector level as I was, this felt unnecessary. I'm not sure if this is needed when changing the size of the drive either, but some of the guides suggest it - I'm not sure why. I didn't want to wipe my drive (which unlocking the bootloader will force) and feel this is an unnecessary pre-requisite

Due to various issues listed below, I used a variety of means to connect the drives to my PC - initially I used SATA-USB connectors, as well as using the onboard SATA on my motherboard - I didn't find any difference in using either option, except the onboard SATA was a LOT faster than USB when it came to writing the image to the SSD - the main thing in each case is to understand the Android formatted drive will appear as unreadable to a Windows PC and regardless of how it is connected, do not initialise or attempt any other operation on the drive in Windows (DMDE will be able to see the drive correctly and show you the partition table so you can see how the drive is built even though Windows doesn't understand how to read it)

As I am just doing a straight clone, I haven't messed around with 4k alignment, and I don't see the advantage in any case - it may be beneficial if using a larger SSD of course due to the way sectors are read and written with larger LBA devices

4. SSD clone

This was the area I had the biggest problems - the original SSHD in the Shield has a power rating of 5V@0.7A - 3.5W max - this is important to note, as foolishly I assumed that the power draw of most SSDs would be similar if not lower (no moving parts) - SATA is SATA right?

I've used SSDs for years in various PCs and laptops and have had great experience with Crucial (Micron) so I picked a 500GB Crucial BX500 - CT500BX500SSD1

The drive cloning operation was flawless (SATA-USB), popped the new SSD in the Shield, booted up first time! Hallelujah - no issues. Boot time went from 90 secs or so down to 40 secs. Was beautiful.... until it wasn't.

After about 2 days, the Shield crashed and then after reboot would not load in to the launcher - no problem I thought - maybe the crash corrupted the data - so i took the SSD out and reflashed the image to the drive (this time from the SATA on the motherboard) thinking this would fix it. It did not.

After analysing the drive on my PC and using the Crucial Storage Executive software I discovered the SSD had been write-locked - a process the SSD uses to 'protect' the data on the SSD if it encounters too many errors so it can be recovered, but prevents new data being written.

I figured I might have been unlucky with this drive so did an RMA and got a replacement. Followed the same process, and this time within 24h the same thing happened to the new SSD - crashed and then reboot fails to load home launcher. So i put back the original drive until I could work out what the hell was going on.

When I took the second drive out I notice the power draw on it was 1.7A - this means that Crucial BX500 would require up to 8.5W which is more than double the power requirement! I figured that this draw was the culprit as the Shield was not providing enough current to the drive to be able to write data correctly. Cue a few days of searching for the various datasheets of SSDs and reviews of them on technology sites to try to find an SSD that had a power draw in-line with the original. I noticed that a lot of people had success with Samsung, so I searched the data sheets which showed that the max power draw on the 500GB 870 EVO was 3.5W - perfect....

I ordered the Samsung model MZ-77E500B/EU (870 EVO 500GB) which to my horror had printed on it a 1.1A current draw! Now I wasn't sure about it as the datasheet said 3.5W, but I figured what the hell and would RMA it if it went wrong. I wrote the image from my backup, the same one used with the Crucial and again it worked perfectly in the Shield, and now a week on from installing it - despite the concern over the rated power printed on the SSD, it has been working flawlessly and touchwood, is going to last where the Crucial would barely last a day before going into a write-lock state

5. Conclusion

Aside from the dramas with the SSD, the process is very straightforward - it can be daunting opening up tech and playing with innards, but as someone who has build PCs for years, this was a pretty simple process, and the benefit of using DMDE means I have a full image of my drive I can re-clone from, or even resize in future should I need.

I paid around £28 for the Crucial SSD, thinking I only needed something cheap, but this 'cheapness' meant that the power draw on the BX500 was a lot higher - the BX500 does NOT have an SLC cache nor a DRAM cache, so I expect every write operation requires full power from the host device - I suspect this is why these SSDs failed - the Shield was not able to power the write operations correctly, causing corrupt data, forcing the drive to write lock - DRAMless and cache-less SSDs are cheaper but need more power it would seem

The 870 EVO was £40 - and for this you get a DRAM cache and an SLC cache which, aside from speeding up the drive significantly (writing the image to the Samsung drive on my PC ran at an average of about 375MB/s wheres the Crucial drive started it's write at about 200MB/s but by the end had slowed to around 50MB/s), I believe the lower power consumption is a key factor as to why the Samsung worked and the Crucial didn't

Aside from much faster operation (Kodi launches almost instantly vs 5-10 secs on the SSHD) and very fast boot times (30-40 secs), the whole device runs MUCH cooler than before - the SSHD original was a big heat generator and is possibly a source of the crashes I was seeing in hotter weather.

So there you have it. Power seems to be an important and overlooked factor in success with this process - the BX500 is a great drive which will go into my PC when I get the 2nd RMA back, but when looking for an SSD to replace the internal SSHD in your Nvidia Shield - try to ensure the power draw on the device isn't too much for the Shield.

This sounds simple but reviews of SSDs don't usually mention power draw - you have to search for their datasheets to find that information. I suspect that DRAM-less and SLC cache-less drives are not ideal due to the controller having to write directly to the MLC/TLC/QLC, whereas SSDs with DRAM-cache and/or SLC cache may be the best option due to the inherent write-buffering these drives offer.

Moral of the story - Shield needs a low power SSD, check the power rating on your drive before trying it in the Shield as it will likely brick the SSD if it requires more power than the shield is able to provide!

As it's only been a week since installing the Samsung, I can't say 100% that this drive is 'OK', but so far it's been great - I can certainly say that despite the BX500 being a good solid SSD for general use, its power draw seems just too much for the Shield. The MX500 by comparison I have read people have had success with, but again the MX500 has a DRAM cache (and an SLC I think) which again suggests that these drives are preferable as they seem to have a lower power draw.

YMMV, good luck with your Shields - I will update this post in a while to let people know if everything is still working!

Edit: two weeks on and Samsung 870 still working well, no issues encountered 🤞