Replace Hard Drive with SSD – Increase Speed

Replacing a hard drive with an SSD – How to replace a hard drive Replacing a hard drive with an SSD in a notebook and increasing the speed.

SSD is one of the elements that is most often chosen when carrying out any hardware upgrade due to its many advantages over hard drives, which until a few years ago dominated the storage sector.

There have been dozens and dozens of products that we have been offering you about these solid state entities, including analysis of the best on the market and today we are going to leave you a much more practical article on the steps to replace a hard drive with an SSD in a notebook, trying to primarily increase performance and/or storage capacity.

The scope of use in a laptop is not unique and an SSD is today also a Clear bet for mounting it on a desktop computer.

We can install it independently if we do not require high capacity or have a large budget to obtain 1 Tbyte models (or more), and also in a hybrid system that some of us use and is ideal in transitional form.

That is, an SSD as the primary drive for the OS and the main applications, and a hard drive (or multiple in RAID) for mass storage.

Today we focus on a notebook but the way to do it is the same on a desktop and the positive results of its installation are forceful in any case, in boot times, app opening, data transfer speed etc.

To the point of resurrecting an old device that doesn't offer much more.

1.- Select and obtain the SSD

Until recently, the options (by offer and price) to obtain an SSD were practically the only ones that were the standard format of 2.5 inch and SATA design.

Nowadays, the offer is considerably larger. For desktop PCs, it is a PCI-Express plug-in card solution, while for notebooks, the ideal solution is a M.2 module also to PCie.

If your laptop supports it, consider purchasing these M.2s because they increase performance, consumption and weight significantly and you will also be able to use the 2.5″ bay to increase storage.

If you are going to mount a 2.5-inch SSD, you will only need to consider its thickness, although you will not have any problem since they are now all offered in a size of 9 or 7 mm.

In the case of M.2, make sure it supports PCIe-NVMe design (there are others connected to SATA, but they are not worth it).

As far as storage capacity It is something that only you have to appreciate depending on your needs.

There are very cheap 120 or 240 GB units if you want to combine it with other units and good prices in 500 GB or 1 TB if you are going to mount them as a single unit.

Samsung, Kingston, WD, OCZ (Toshiba), SanDisk, Vital… Nowadays, any of the major manufacturers will offer you warranty and performance in SSDs in both 2.5-inch and M.2 formats.

2.- Store the data

If the acquisition of the SSD is encouraged by the failure of a hard disk we will not be able to do much. Remove it immediately and use prepared developer or third-party tools for low-level formatting or others on another device.

If the hard drive is in use and working well, before any replacement action we must consider performing disk backups.

These arose from the claims of each of them.

We have multiple options:

• The most complete would be a Full hard drive cloning to preserve OS, apps, files, and user settings. Several SSD developers offer apps for this, and third-party developers offer free apps. You'll need an external drive to do this, or directly on the SSD with conversion kits and/or cabling that passes data from USB to the typically SATA SSD design.
• If you don't need cloning, you can use the recovery discs given to you by your laptop's manufacturer.
• If you don't have manufacturer restore discs or want to make custom backups, all recent OS offer tools to do so. backups which is also a very beneficial task that is part of the maintenance of the system itself. There are also good third-party apps that can be used.
• If you are going to perform a clean installation from the beginning from a DVD/USB that you have ready with the OS, simply look at the disk to store your personal files (documents, photos...), which you can archive on any media or on the cloud storage service you use.

3.- Mount the SSD

Once we have saved the data we need and have the boot disk or backup on hand to set up the system, we move on to the assembly.

Every laptop is a planet, but looking at its back we won't have many problems finding the location of the hard drive.

There are models that have a dedicated space or others that require disassembling the entire lid.

We found ourselves doing a hands-on on an MSI Leopard.

We remove any connected peripherals, the power cable and the battery. We examine the back of the device and remove some screws to access its interior.

We will locate the storage entities shortly.

The bay where the hard drive is installed and the added M.2 to PCIe slot.

If we are going to use a 2.5-inch model, we remove the screws that hold the hard drive and use that bay to install the SSD:

The same applies if we have chosen an M.2. We remove the retaining screw, mount it and screw it back in to secure the unit.

There is little left for us to do other than reassemble the laptop lid, connect the battery, the power cable or the peripherals.

4.- Configuration, system installation and data

If you have used an SSD to PCIe and you are going to also support the hard drive (or an SSD), make sure that the PCIe is the first boot device.

This chapter is set in BIOS/UEFI.

If we have previously cloned the SSD, we will only have to start the device.

If we did not do so and depending on the type of backup we made, we will have to install the OS and/or apps, restoring the backup or installing from scratch.

After the first start we only have left Properly configure the SSD to work on the device because it has certain characteristics over hard drives.

We have already discussed some of them in other articles, such as disabling defragmentation or possibly having the TRIM command enabled.

Most SSD manufacturers offer a configuration app that is easy to use, as it allows you to configure the drive for optimal performance, view its status, keep the firmware updated or encrypt the data on the disk if you need to.

All set.

A user who has not tried it will be amazed at the “life” that Recover any old notebook that replaces the hard drive with an SSD.

This type of update can also be performed on a desktop PC and with various configuration options.

Whether only with SSD or in hybrid systems where we would take advantage of hard drives to have much more storage capacity and SSDs as the first boot unit to have the system and the main applications using their greatest performance.

Your notebook may also need other checks check here.