Simple Steps to upgrade The SSD of your computer

How to Upgrade The SSD

Time needed: 60 minutes

Difficulty rating: 4/10

A solid-state drive (SSD) is one of the most significant upgrades you can make to any PC. Mechanical storage now acts as a massive  bottleneck to overall performance, and with modern SSDs offering anywhere from five and 50 times the performance of a mechanical disk depending on workload, a drive upgrade can restore snappiness  to even the oldest of systems. Laptops tend to be fussier with SSD brand than their desktop counterparts, so our advice would be to opt for an Intel or Samsung drive where possible. Initially we used a G.Skill SSD for this project, but its power up cycle was too slow forthe laptop’s POST sequence, causing the laptop to fail to boot at least one in three times. For this reason, our upgrade technically consists of  moving from one SSD to another!

You may want to use the drive upgrade as an excuse to reinstall your operating system. If you keep a tidy ship, however, this is probably a waste of time, as you can simply clone your software from one drive to another instead. There are a couple of methods that will facilitate this. The quickest way is to remove the source drive from the laptop and connect it up to a desktop PC. Use software to takea snapshot of this drive and then write the resulting image file to the new SSD. You then just pop the new SSD back into the laptop and it should boot into Windows as if nothing happened, albeit at a vastly improved speed. If your PC has two spare SATA connectors available, you can even connect both old and new drives at the same time and copy the contents from one to the other. If you don’t have a spare desktop PC to hand, then you can connect the new SSD to the computer via a SATA to USB convertor cable. 

These cables can be purchased for less than £10 and will convert your SSD into a temporary external hard disk. You then, once again, use cloning software to copy the data from the original source disk to the new drive instead. As it’s a little more involved, we’ll be using the desktop cloning method for our step-by-step guide. It might seem like more than a faff to take out your drive and plug it into a desktop, but the datamigration should only take 15 or 20 minutes for 100GB of data,compared to potentially several hours over USB. 

If you have a fast gigabit Ethernet network, you could even be extra crafty and image your laptop drive to a network device, meaning you only need connect up the new drive before imaging.

Step 1. Ensure you don’t have too much data!

SSDs might be lightning fast, but they tend to be considerably smaller in capacity compared to mechanical drives unless you spend a lot of money. For this reason, you need to make sure that you don’t have too much data for the migration. First of all, tackle the  usual suspects like music files (particularly iTunes directories),downloaded movies and photos. If you’re still struggling for space, consider uninstalling any games you have on the PC; these are notorious space hogs. If you don’t really know where the bulkof your space is being used, consider downloading the fantasticbut obscurely named WinDirStat, which will break your files and folders down into an easy to visualise diagram, with larger blocksrepresenting a folder taking up a load of space.

Step 2. Remove your existing HDD

Our MSI laptop has a discrete hatch for the storage drive separate from the main guts of the system. This makes it very easy to gain access to the drive. First of all, we remove the two small screwskeeping the hatch closed. Once out, we popped off the plastic cover to reveal the HDD. To remove the existing SSD we used the metal retention frame to very slightly lift the drive up before pulling it away and out of the SATA plug. The drive simply un-slots from this connection. The SATA and SATA power connectors on a laptop 2.5”are the same as those used in desktops.

Step 3. Attach the SSD to the desktop

Hooking up the 2.5” HDD to your desktop is just like installing any other drive, though we wouldn’t recommend you bother mounting it to the case. Just make sure it’s carefully balanced and you can umbilically connect it to the motherboard. Once connected, ensure your boot order on the desktop is still correct or it may attempt to boot from the SSD. All being well, the drive will be detected by Windows on your desktop and appear as a secondary drive.

Step 4. Take an image of the laptop HDD

If you already own useful cloning software like Acronis True Image, you can use this to facilitate the transition. If not, then we recommend you download Macrium Reflect - freeware cloning and imaging software that is ideal for this kind of task. Using Macrium, you simply select the laptop HDD as the source and click ‘Image this disk’. Save the image to your desktop’s storage drive. Once done, shut down the desktop and remove the laptop hardware, this time connecting the SSD.

Step 5. Restore image to new SSD

Windows should detect the SSD once the desktop has started up, but do not be alarmed if it doesn’t appear in Windows Explorer, as it would need partitions to be present in order to be seen by the OS. Fire up Macrium Reflect again and click on the restore tab. Locate the image file you created in step 4 and point the software to the new SSD. Be sure that the sizes of partition are correct and will give you the full space of the drive and, most importantly, that the partition alignment is set to Vista/7/SSD. This can be used to convert a Windows XP based partition to an SSD-friendly partition alignment. While an incorrect partition alignment won’t affect functionality, it will cost you performance and increase wear level on your SSD.

Step 6. Install the SSD back in the laptop

First we needed to transplant the metal retention frame from the old drive to the new one. This was done by replacing two small screws. Secondly, you align the SATA power and data connections carefully before pushing the drive home. It should move in approximately 5mm and the frame will then fit flush once again. Different notebooks employ different kinds of retention frames, so refer to your laptop’s service manual if it isn’t obvious what you need to do. Replace the rear cover and, all being well, your laptop will boot back up quicker than ever before!

Simple Steps to upgrade The SSD of your computer

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How to Upgrade The SSD

Time needed: 60 minutes

Difficulty rating: 4/10

A solid-state drive (SSD) is one of the most significant upgrades you can make to any PC. Mechanical storage now acts as a massive  bottleneck to overall performance, and with modern SSDs offering anywhere from five and 50 times the performance of a mechanical disk depending on workload, a drive upgrade can restore snappiness  to even the oldest of systems. Laptops tend to be fussier with SSD brand than their desktop counterparts, so our advice would be to opt for an Intel or Samsung drive where possible. Initially we used a G.Skill SSD for this project, but its power up cycle was too slow forthe laptop’s POST sequence, causing the laptop to fail to boot at least one in three times. For this reason, our upgrade technically consists of  moving from one SSD to another!

You may want to use the drive upgrade as an excuse to reinstall your operating system. If you keep a tidy ship, however, this is probably a waste of time, as you can simply clone your software from one drive to another instead. There are a couple of methods that will facilitate this. The quickest way is to remove the source drive from the laptop and connect it up to a desktop PC. Use software to takea snapshot of this drive and then write the resulting image file to the new SSD. You then just pop the new SSD back into the laptop and it should boot into Windows as if nothing happened, albeit at a vastly improved speed. If your PC has two spare SATA connectors available, you can even connect both old and new drives at the same time and copy the contents from one to the other. If you don’t have a spare desktop PC to hand, then you can connect the new SSD to the computer via a SATA to USB convertor cable. 

These cables can be purchased for less than £10 and will convert your SSD into a temporary external hard disk. You then, once again, use cloning software to copy the data from the original source disk to the new drive instead. As it’s a little more involved, we’ll be using the desktop cloning method for our step-by-step guide. It might seem like more than a faff to take out your drive and plug it into a desktop, but the datamigration should only take 15 or 20 minutes for 100GB of data,compared to potentially several hours over USB. 

If you have a fast gigabit Ethernet network, you could even be extra crafty and image your laptop drive to a network device, meaning you only need connect up the new drive before imaging.

Step 1. Ensure you don’t have too much data!

SSDs might be lightning fast, but they tend to be considerably smaller in capacity compared to mechanical drives unless you spend a lot of money. For this reason, you need to make sure that you don’t have too much data for the migration. First of all, tackle the  usual suspects like music files (particularly iTunes directories),downloaded movies and photos. If you’re still struggling for space, consider uninstalling any games you have on the PC; these are notorious space hogs. If you don’t really know where the bulkof your space is being used, consider downloading the fantasticbut obscurely named WinDirStat, which will break your files and folders down into an easy to visualise diagram, with larger blocksrepresenting a folder taking up a load of space.

Step 2. Remove your existing HDD

Our MSI laptop has a discrete hatch for the storage drive separate from the main guts of the system. This makes it very easy to gain access to the drive. First of all, we remove the two small screwskeeping the hatch closed. Once out, we popped off the plastic cover to reveal the HDD. To remove the existing SSD we used the metal retention frame to very slightly lift the drive up before pulling it away and out of the SATA plug. The drive simply un-slots from this connection. The SATA and SATA power connectors on a laptop 2.5”are the same as those used in desktops.

Step 3. Attach the SSD to the desktop

Hooking up the 2.5” HDD to your desktop is just like installing any other drive, though we wouldn’t recommend you bother mounting it to the case. Just make sure it’s carefully balanced and you can umbilically connect it to the motherboard. Once connected, ensure your boot order on the desktop is still correct or it may attempt to boot from the SSD. All being well, the drive will be detected by Windows on your desktop and appear as a secondary drive.

Step 4. Take an image of the laptop HDD

If you already own useful cloning software like Acronis True Image, you can use this to facilitate the transition. If not, then we recommend you download Macrium Reflect - freeware cloning and imaging software that is ideal for this kind of task. Using Macrium, you simply select the laptop HDD as the source and click ‘Image this disk’. Save the image to your desktop’s storage drive. Once done, shut down the desktop and remove the laptop hardware, this time connecting the SSD.

Step 5. Restore image to new SSD

Windows should detect the SSD once the desktop has started up, but do not be alarmed if it doesn’t appear in Windows Explorer, as it would need partitions to be present in order to be seen by the OS. Fire up Macrium Reflect again and click on the restore tab. Locate the image file you created in step 4 and point the software to the new SSD. Be sure that the sizes of partition are correct and will give you the full space of the drive and, most importantly, that the partition alignment is set to Vista/7/SSD. This can be used to convert a Windows XP based partition to an SSD-friendly partition alignment. While an incorrect partition alignment won’t affect functionality, it will cost you performance and increase wear level on your SSD.

Step 6. Install the SSD back in the laptop

First we needed to transplant the metal retention frame from the old drive to the new one. This was done by replacing two small screws. Secondly, you align the SATA power and data connections carefully before pushing the drive home. It should move in approximately 5mm and the frame will then fit flush once again. Different notebooks employ different kinds of retention frames, so refer to your laptop’s service manual if it isn’t obvious what you need to do. Replace the rear cover and, all being well, your laptop will boot back up quicker than ever before!