Upgrade your laptop hard drive to an SSD

Here is a how to replace your laptop hard drive with an SSD.

Is your laptop running slow? Is your disk utilization always at 80 to 100 percent? Well, ours WAS before we converted our spinning hard drive with a Solid State Drive. We replaced this drive about a year ago. This was due to a space issue, now we have a slowness issue. Here is our step by step process we took.

Here is the link to the actual 2TB SSD hard drive from amazon.

What tools are needed to replace your hard drive?

Steps Taken to Clone the hard drive.

1. We ensured it was powered off and the battery was removed.
2. Unscrewed all back cover screws. There are two hidden screws under the rubber feet closest to the screen. If you do not remove those you might break your laptop.
3. Took the cover off and removed the old spinning hard drive.
4. We prepped our cloning hardware. We put our old hard drive in the source, and our new 2TB crucial SSD into the destination slot in the toaster. (Not a real toaster)
5. Held down the clone button and waited for approximately six hours. Yes, six hours to clone the hard drives.  When the hard drive is completed the cloning process the lights will blink all together.

After the hard drive was cloned. We put the new SSD into the place of the old slot and buttoned everything back up. Oh, we did purchase a new laptop battery. Our rule of thumb is that every couple years, we replace our laptop battery, this ensures we are getting the enough battery juice.

For some reason, after 500+ hard drive swaps. We always receive an error the first time we boot up the desktop computer or laptop. We believe the computer at first doesn’t recognize the new hardware and shoots off this error.

When windows is done collecting its data and it is rebooted. Everything is back to normal. Our new 2TB SSD is installed and working a lot better than a spinning disk hard drive. As you can see, our windows login prompt is awaiting our password with our new hard drive installed.

What if you don’t have  StarTech cloning hardware?

That is not an issue. You will need to follow Crucial Cloning link to download the software. Their cloning software is Arcronis which is a highly respected software.  You will plug the USB cable into your laptop or desktop you want to clone and the other end of the cable into your SSD. After you have connected you will follow the on-screen directions. We did not go through the crucial cloning software because we have a toaster to duplicate our data. We will purchase a new SSD and create a how to.