How to Upgrade Your Laptops Hard Drive to an SSDTheres no better way to speed up and upgrade a laptop than to replace its mechanical drive with an SSD Solid State Drive. Its a no brainer, but if the thought of reinstalling Windows 1. In an hour or two, you can easily be up and running with a clone of your current system except now your laptop will have blazing performance. Heres how to do it. Before You Begin Check Upgradability. The process of upgrading your laptop to SSD is fairly simple if you have easy access to your hard drive via a removable panel on the bottom of the laptop. If you have an Ultrabook or your laptop doesnt have that kind of easy upgrade access e. Otherwise, this tutorial will help those of you with the removable panel through preparing your laptop, cloning your system, and making the big swap. Find the right SSD form factor and interface. The other thing youll want to check before you go out and buy a replacement SSD is your drives form factor you need to make sure the drive will fit in the laptop. Most laptops have 2. SOLVED but i dont know how. I have done everything like Knickle said but it doesnt help making new partition after loading drivers and then. Also, even 2. 5 inch drives can have different thicknesses 7 mm or 9. SATA or IDE, usually in laptops from 2. Laptops most widely use 2. SATA drives, but you should check your laptop manual or specifications to make sure you buy the right size SSD with the proper interface. Alternatively, you may be able to find this information by visiting Crucials Advisor Tool or looking at your current drives label Open the access panel and look on the drive itself to see if it says 2. SATA and what thickness you need. Generally, 7mm, 2. SATA SSDs will fit even in the 9. MORE 8 Biggest Tech Rip Offs and How To Avoid Them. What Youll Need An SSD, of course. In addition to getting a drive with the right form factor and interface, youll want to get an SSD with at least enough room for the Windows partition and any system recovery partitions. A 2. 50. GB Samsung SSD is currently about 8. Amazon and a 5. 00. Hitachi-Travelstar-250GB-5400-RPM-SATA-Notebook-Hard-Drive-HTS545025B9A300-5K500-B250.jpg' alt='Hitachi 250Gb External Hard Drive Drivers' title='Hitachi 250Gb External Hard Drive Drivers' />GB version is about 1. For most people, the 2. GB drive should be fine, but the 5. GB one offers more flexibility, for only a little more investment. An external enclosure or adapter to connect that SSD to your laptop. For this how to, we used a Star. Tech SATA external hard drive enclosure, although theres an updated USB 3. Amazon. Either way, the enclosure comes in handy not just for connecting the SSD for the cloning process, but also afterward to turn your current drive, once its replaced by the SSD, into an external one for backups and other storage. C# Wpf Binding Converterparameter'>C# Wpf Binding Converterparameter. Small Phillips screwdriver. Separate external hard drive optional. Word Slinger Game. You might need this if you have large folders, such as photos and videos, that might not fit on your SSD, and also to create a full system backup at the start. MORE 1. 2 Dumbest PC Default Settings and How to Change ThemPrepare Your Current Drive for Cloning. First we need to do a little prep work on your current drive. In the market for a new computer system or other tech product Computer Shopper reviews all the latest consumer and business hardware laptops, desktops, printers, PC. Make a full backup of your system. Create a system image backup in Windows 1. Control Panel hit the WinX keyboard shortcut and select Control Panel, then go to Save backup copies of your files with File History under System and Security. In the left menu, go to System Image Backup to create a system image on an external drive or network location. Move large folders that dont need to be kept on the SSD. Chances are your hard drive is larger than the SSD you are transferring to for example, moving from a 5. GB HDD with lots of media files to a 1. GB SSD. If this is the case, move larger folders such as those containing your photos, videos, games, and personal documents to an external drive or other location to make enough space on your drive for cloning to the smaller SSD. Clean up your drive for additional space. This is also the time to uninstall programs you arent using anymore and delete unnecessary files that you dont want carried over to your SSD. Make one last uncluttering sweep with freeware CCleaner, which deletes old temp files and other space hogs, or at the very least run Windows disk cleanup in Windows search look for disk cleanup, then choose Free up disk space on this PC. Connect the SSDNow well get the SSD set up for the cloning process. Physically connect the SSD. Place the SSD in the enclosure or connect it to the USB to SATA adapter, and then connect it to your laptop with the USB cable. Initialize the SSD. If the SSD doesnt show up on your computer with a new drive letter, head to Windows Disk Management tool. Bring up Windows search again and look for disk management, then choose Create and format hard disk partitions. In Disk Management, you should see the SSD as a new disk under your current one. If it says Not initialized, right click on the drive and choose Initialize disk. Resize the current drive partition to be the same size or smaller than the SSD. While youre in Disk Management, check to see if your current disks primary partition usually, C, the one that has Windows and your installed programs is larger than the SSD. If not, youll need to shrink the partition so that it and the other system recovery partitions are smaller than the SSD. Right click on the OS partition and choose ShrinkIn the next window, leave the defaults and click Shrink. This will resize the primary partition so its smaller and leave the rest of the space as unallocated. Dont worry during the cloning process, the cloning software will properly resize and allocate extra space to the main partition on your SSD. At this time, you should restart your computer to make sure that the partition works before cloning. MORE 8 Essential Tips for Your New Windows 8 PCClone Your Hard Drive. Finally, its time to clone your drive to the SSD. Install disk cloning software. For this tutorial, were using Ease. US Todo Backup Free, which is free for personal use, has a user friendly interface, and also optimizes the migration to an SSD. Select the source and destination drives in the cloning software. In Ease. US Todo Backup, select the Clone option from the main menu. Follow the wizard to select your source disk your HDD and your destination the SSD. Note in particular that you should tick the Optimize for SSD option when you select the destination drive. This makes sure the sectors are aligned on your SSD and improves your chances of booting from the SSD after the cloning process. Ease. US notes that its not necessary to tick the sector by sector option, which copies every sector over, even if theyre empty or bad. Review the layout and start cloning. In the next screen, youll be able to compare the source drive with your SSD. As you see below, Ease. US automatically adjusts for different sized drives by using the unallocated space on your current drive which we created in step 3 of the last section. Click Proceed then choose Shut down computer when the operation completed. This took us about 4. Physically Swap Your Current Drive with the SSDNow lets remove the old drive and install the SSD. Turn the computer off and remove the back panel. Turn your laptop off and then disconnect both the power cable and any other connected cables including the SSD. Then unscrew the back panel and remove it to get access to your hard drive. Look for any screws securing your drive to the laptop. Youll need to unscrew those before you can remove the drive. Lift the old drive up about 3.