I had high hopes going into the afternoon of yesterday, July 6th, 2024. I’d purchased a new NVMe drive, a TEAMGROUP MP44 4TB drive, for my Sager notebook just a day or so earlier. Amazon had delivered it that morning, and my son and I were set to crack open the laptop case and get busy.

(I say “my son and I,” but I should say, “my son, with me as onlooker” instead. Alas, at my age, I’ve grown too shaky and too infirm to reliably handle cracking open a laptop on my own, so I’ve entrusted the task to my more-than-capable-yet-very-nervous-because-he’s-never-been-inside-a-$3000-laptop-before son instead. And yes, the price is right in that previous sentence; I had to fork over “Gamer Laptop” money to get the horsepower I needed (e.g., i9 CPU, 32GB RAM, etc.) to write/mix/master music. I got the horsepower, plus some bells and whistles – my keyboard flashes in a most colorfully pleasing way when I type on it. But I digress.)

The two of us brought the laptop to the dining table, and he set about undressing it from its hard plastic case. He ran into a bit of a problem right off the bat, as two of the screws holding the back cover didn’t want to come out. He had to remove the other screws first before he could get the other screws to relent.

Once inside, it took us a minute to locate the “hard drive” bay. (I use quotation marks for his benefits, since he absolutely refuses to call the new generation of NVMe drives by the term “hard drives.” He insists upon calling them “storage devices,” a term I consider unnecessarily long. I say, call them a “drive” and be done with it.) We eventually got the lid off of it, and he started to work on unscrewing the retaining screw holding in the 1TB Samsung 970 EVO drive (ahem) that has been my current drive. (N.B. – tunnel vision on my part sets in right about…now.) He worked and worked at unscrewing it, but with no joy – the Phillips head screw was stripped. Don’t ask me how it got that way.

My mind kicked into “how do we fix this” mode at that point. My solution was to take the laptop to an electronics repair shop. My son had a hard time shutting me up over the matter. Once he did, though, he pointed out that the Sager engineers, in their infinite wisdom, had built not just one, but three slots for NVMe drives into the drive bay.

Gulp. How the hell did I miss that???

I’d been tasked with researching the living daylights out of my Sager NP9672M laptop (bought in 2021, it’s no longer on Sager’s website, sad to say – can you find a schematic? Contact me if you can), and there are no schematics in the PDF manual for the thing. That’s what I was looking for when I researched it, so I apparently only researched the zombie daylights out of it. On post mortem research, there was mention of multiple NVMe slots available in the thing, but you had to squint in order to see it. Sigh. But I digress, again.

When my son gave me the news of the additional slots, my mood did a 180°. It did yet another 180° when he informed me that there were no retention screws to hold any additional NVMe drives in place. The engineers at Sager, in their infinite wisdom, must have omitted the screws in an attempt to save weight, knowing that the manufacturers of NVMe drives would surely include retention screws in the packaging with their very expensive drives (okay, mine was a relative bargain at $253.29). The engineers at TEAMGROUP, meanwhile, in their infinite wisdom, must have omitted said screws in an attempt to save weight, knowing that the manufacturers of NVMe slots would surely include retention screws in the cases with their very expensive computers. Alas, they were at cross purposes with each other, and for want of a screw, the terabytes of my new drive were lost.

Sigh. Several minutes of fruitless searching through my own screw inventory turned up nothing compatible. Time to put things back together and end the attempt for the day.

I’ve submitted a trouble ticket to Sager, as silly as that may sound, asking them to send me some retention screws. They have lifetime support on their products. If there’s a fee for the hardware, I don’t know if I’ll pay it, because I’ve got back onto Amazon and ordered a set of NVMe screws and washers (with a little screwdriver included with it) for about $5. My son insists that every manufacturer’s screws are proprietary, ergo only Sager screws should be used in Sager NVMe slots. If the ones I’ve ordered from Amazon don’t work, and if there’s a charge for the Sager screws, then I guess I’ll have no choice but to pay the fee. Sillier and sillier things get.

Hopefully, sometime on Monday, July 8th, 2024, I’ll have a Sager notebook with 5TB of storage space in it. If not, I could be screwed.