HP ENVY TouchSmart 15t-j000

Question

Good morning.
I just received my new laptop, with 256 SSD & 1 T hard drive.
My question is whether I can replace the 256 SSD with 1 T SSD 2,5" ?
Reason is that having 2 drives of 1 T each, I can make regular and frequent cloning from C to D, so if something goes wrong
I can just replace the C (SSD) with the D (Normal hard drive) and be back in business at a snap (am I a dreamer ?).
I already use my old laptop with 2 X 516 Gb drives and use to clone each of them on equal capacity external drives every week. However since I do not really need more than few hundred Gbs for both Windows and storage, I just want to be able
to clone from C to D instead of using external drives for cloning.
I just saw that mSSD and 2,5" SSD are not physically the same. However I also see an adaptor (please see the link)
that may be used to accommodate a higher mSSD (1 T) and then placed in the socket of the mSSD in the laptop.
Unless of course the socket in the laptop is restricting the use of mSSD only.
http://www.amazon.com/Syba-mSATA-2-5-Inch-Adapter-SY-ADA40050/dp/B007PPZ2I8/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics...
Thanks in advance for any comment on my question.
Have a blessed day.
Antonios

Answer 1

That model is so new there is no Service Manual the describes it. Officially, the Touchsmart 15t-j000 only supports a 24 gig mSSD as an acceleration cache and the mSSD slot could not be the boot drive if a regular hard drive is also installed. See page 5 of the Manual here:
Manual
The prior limit was implemented in the BIOS and there were a lot of people asking HP to make the mSSD the boot drive and now they have apparently complied. They also used to not sell an mSSD on models with 12 or 16 gigs of RAM and that is obviously no longer the case.
If you want to protect your data simply make a 240 gig partition on the 1 TB drive and use backup software like Acronis or even Windows Backup and run a regular backup to that partition of the main drive. If the mSATA dies you can stick in another mSATA mSSD, boot the system from a utility disk and copy the contents of the backup partition back onto the new mSSD.  If you put in a 1 TB mSSD (which is going to cost an arm and a leg) I guess you would use the whole mechanical drive as a backup location but the principle would be the same. As long as you have an active backup image on the mechanical drive you should be fine. I would not buy a second mSSD just on the very remote chance the first one is going to go bad. 
I believe your model also has RAID ability and you could set up a 1 TB mSSD and the 1 TB mechanical drive in a RAID-1 (mirror) but boot from the mSSD and if it goes bad just remove the mSSD and set the machine to boot from the mechanical drive, which would be slower but would give you zero downtime. If you create the RAID-1 array it would mean reinstalling the operating system onto the array.