How to Upgrade your Laptop to an SSD
Upgrading your Laptop’s Hard Drive to an SSD is the best thing you can do to increase speed & performance, and if you clone your HDD to SSD you can do it without reinstalling Windows!
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⚡ iFixit Toolkit: https://geni.us/iFixitTools
⚡ Crucial MX500 2TB SSD: https://geni.us/CrucialSSD2TB
⚡ Hard Drive Docking Station: https://geni.us/HardDriveDock
⚡ USB Flash Drive: https://geni.us/USB-FlashDrive
⚡ USB Hard Drive Enclosure (turn old hard drive into portable drive) https://geni.us/HardDriveEnclosureUSBC
Create installation media for Windows:
📀 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/create-installation-media-for-windows-99a58364-8c02-206f-aa6f-40c3b507420d
How to Install SSD in laptop (without reinstalling Windows).
When you replace your HDD with an SSD (on either Windows 10 or Windows 11) you have two options; to upgrade to an SSD without installing Windows (this video shows you how to clone an HDD to SSD using a hard drive docking station) or you can learn how to install Windows on a blank SSD using bootable USB Windows installation media.
Following the steps in this video and using the hard drive docking station as demonstrated, you will also learn how to replace a laptop hard drive without reinstalling Windows as well as how to upgrade SSD on PC.
If your laptop seems to be getting slower and more sluggish, swapping out the hard drive for an SSD is one of the best ways to dramatically improve your laptop’s speed and performance PLUS it will also help to increase its battery life and keep it slightly cooler on your lap, too.
When installing a new drive into your laptop, whether that’s switching from an older hard drive to a solid-state drive or if you’re swapping the drive for another reason such as upgrading for more storage space, you’ve got a choice as to whether you want to put the new drive in blank and install Windows — or whatever operating system you’ll be using — from scratch or to clone the contents of the old hard drive onto the new one. I’ll be showing you both options in this video — and keep watching to the end as I’ll be showing you what you can do to put your laptop’s old hard drive to good use, too.
My preference is to go for a clean installation on the new drive, especially if like this laptop, you have lots of preinstalled bloatware from the manufacturer and the whole system could do with a general refresh too. If you do this, make sure you deactivate any paid-for or subscription software you have installed on your machine, like Photoshop for example, so it’s easier to reinstall and get working again later.
Next, a Hard drive docking station like this is a really useful thing to own. This one accepts both 2.5" and 3.5" SATA hard drives and SSDs and comes in both USB A or USB-C varieties.
It’s great both for grabbing stuff off your old hard drive if you connect it to your computer with a USB cable, and you can also use it as a standalone device to create an exact mirror of your hard drive onto the SSD if you prefer that method rather than installing the SSD blank and installing Windows onto it.
If you can’t decide whether to install Windows fresh or clone it, comment below to start a conversation and I’ll help you decide.
If you want a fresh, clean Windows installation though, before you proceed, you’ll need to make a bootable USB installation drive for Windows. If you don’t need to do this, you can skip ahead to the next step using this video’s chapters.
You’ll need a USB flash drive that’s at least 8GB in size. I’ve put a link in the video description which takes you to the Microsoft website where you can select the version of Windows, Windows 10 in this case, then under Create Window 10 installation media you can click Download Tool Now .
Run the tool and when it asks what you want to do, choose Create Installation media.
If you’re running this on the same laptop you’ll be installing Windows on later, leave ticked the box that says “ Use the recommended options for this PC “. Plug in your USB flash drive and then select it from the drive list — be careful to select the right one as everything on it’ll get wiped. The tool will then download the most up-to-date Windows setup files and set them up on the USB flash drive ready for use later once you’ve installed your new SSD. It’ll take a little while and you can still use your computer for other things whilst it completes.
The next step now is to remove your current hard drive. Some laptops have special flaps to let you easily access RAM and hard drives, but sadly newer ones tend not to so you have to take the whole bottom off. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but it does make it slightly more complicated and potentially daunting to open up the whole machine. But don’t worry, these steps will guide you though and you’ll see how easy it can be. As a supporter of Right to Repair I believe we should go back to having easy-access flaps that lift up so you can quickly get to the good stuff underneath. Comment below and hit the Thumbs Up if you agree!
So, to completely remove this laptop’s outer garments, flip the laptop over and if it has a removable battery, remove it. The exact procedure from here on in varies from laptop to laptop so yours might be quite different from this, but the general concepts are all the same.
Remove all the screws, and place them to one side being careful not to let any roll away and get lost. Be sure to pay attention to where each screw came from if, on your laptop, some are different lengths. Fortunately on this one they all seem to be the same length.
This laptop is fairly easy to disassemble but if it’s not immediately obvious how to do that on yours, iFixit.com is great for disassembly guides — just search for your model of laptop. They also do some great quality toolkits for repairing gadgets, so if you need a set of precision screwdrivers, picks, spudgers and other opening tools then I’ll leave a link in the video description to this Pro Tech Toolkit.
You may well find screws hidden under the soft little feet in the corners so you’ll have to peel them away to reveal the extra screws.
With all the screws removed, use a plastic pick to gently pry apart the laptop at the edges. Take your time and gently run along to unclip the plastic clips underneath, being careful not to snap them!
Once it’s loose, take off the lid to reveal the inner workings of the laptop. This is the hard drive, here. SATA Hard drives have two connections running to them, for power and data, but it’s quite common — like on this laptop here — for a separate little circuit board (sometimes called a daughterboard) to connect to them both and then use one combined connection back to the computer’s main motherboard. So in this case, it’s just this flap here we need to lever up carefully to disconnect the hard drive. Then you can remove all the screws and carefully lift away the hard drive, slide the daughterboard off and remove the mounting hardware from the drive.
If you want to clone your hard drive’s contents onto the SSD, then it’s at this stage that you can use that hard drive docking station to do that with 1 simple button press. But if you want to install a completely fresh Windows installation then you don’t need to do that and can move onto the next stage.
Attach the SSD to the laptop’s mounting hardware being careful to attach it all the same way round as the hard drive sat, and then screw it in place and connect any ribbon cables.
Then, just reverse all the steps to put the laptop back together ready for switch-on.
If you cloned your hard drive contents to the SSD then you should be finished now, although if the SSD is larger than the hard drive was then you might have a partition which is only as large as your hard drive was, in which case some free space might be left unused and unavailable — go into Disk Management to remedy that.
If you’re going down the fresh install road then grab the USB flash drive you made earlier on and boot up from that. To do that, depending on your laptop and how old it is, you may need to go into BIOS / or UEFI to disable secure boot and then go to legacy and get it to boot off USB first. Don’t forget to either change this back or restore defaults after you’ve installed Windows!
Your computer will now boot from the USB drive and you can install a fresh copy of Windows and once that’s done you can then use a hard drive docking station to copy all the data off your old hard drive and back onto your laptop and its new SSD, and then once you’ve done that — don’t throw away that old hard drive, buy a cheap portable USB caddy like this one to turn it into a handy portable external hard drive that you can use for things like backups and carrying large files and documents around with you.
Originally published at https://www.switchedonnetwork.com on March 16, 2022.
