HOW TO UPGRADE YOUR LAPTOP’S SSD IN 15 MINUTES
Lee Grant provides practical, step-by-step advice on both the physical and digital aspects of replacing your laptop’s SSD
SSDs are the miracle component in a laptop. They’re the undervalued and rarely mentioned MVP that thrash themselves stupid to give our machines some actual performance whilst CPUs and RAM bask in the glory.
They’re also – and don’t tell anyone we said this – a way that some manufacturers can maximise profits by supplying small capacity, low-grade versions with no one really noticing. Here, we’re going to demonstrate, with some preparation, how to upgrade your laptop’s SSD in just 15 minutes.
We’ll go through the two most common upgrade scenarios. First, we’ll cover opening the laptop and installing a spanking new SSD with a fresh copy of Windows. In our second guide, we’ll tackle the more complicated procedure of drive cloning, explain everything you need to get through the upgrade and point out some handy resources on the way.
These procedures require extra kit: a USB stick, some drive caddies and a few selected apps. You’ll also need a small screwdriver, a cool head and a smidge of bravery, which is a free gift with this month’s issue.
In true Cooking with Mother style, we’re going to demo these techniques on our “guinea pig laptop” (the GPL), so you can play along at home. It’s a 2016 HP with an Intel Core i3-6100U CPU and 8GB of RAM. We’ll come to the hard drive later.
However, before we show how to deliver breathtaking speed to your machine, there are some things you need to know.
First steps
It’s impossible to begin without working out what type of drive is inside your current machine and exploring the options for the replacement. The simplest method to is use Speccy ( ccleaner.com/
speccy) to analyse the system. Depending on the laptop, Speccy should detail your drive but if not, a quick Google of the model number it displays will tell you what’s inside. Capacity is important too because it’s a frustrating experience failing to migrate 750GB of precious data onto a
256GB SSD. Open File Explorer, select This PC and Windows will display how much data is on your partitions and drives.
Speccy reveals our GPL has a bogstandard 1TB SATA hard disk with around 56GB of data.
SSD spotting
SSDs come in two flavours: NVMe and SATA. NVMe SSDs use the PCI Express (PCIe) system to shuttle the data around at a much faster rate than a SATA SSD, but your machine may only be compatible with one type.
NVMe laptop drives use the M.2 form factor, which is incompatible with SATA connectors. M.2 drives come in various lengths, but the 2280 format (which is 22mm wide by 80mm long) is the most common. To confuse things further for a moment, M.2 drives also come in a SATA version. The confusion occurs because M.2 describes the connection to the motherboard and not whether the SSD is SATA or NVMe.
If your research reveals that there’s a SATA hard disk, a SATA SSD is almost certainly the best upgrade. If you’re very lucky, your laptop’s motherboard may have SATA ports and an NVMe M.2 socket enabling the “golden upgrade”: a sluggish SATA hard disk to a rocket-ship NVMe SSD. If there is already an M.2 NVMe present in your laptop then you should replace it with the same, but how fast and of what capacity is your choice.
Owners of 11th-generation Intel or third generation AMD Ryzen processors should investigate if the laptop can accept a PCIe 4 NVMe SSD instead of PCIe 3. Your existing drive should be a big clue but also research the motherboard model number (available from Speccy) or look in the service manual on the laptop manufacturer’s website. The speed difference will be worth the effort, but only if you have those latter-day chips: if not, you’ll have a superfast PCIe 4 drive sitting in a PCIe 3 slot and therefore running at PCIe 3 speeds.
For our GPL, we’ll upgrade the SATA hard disk to a SATA SSD. Although it’s won’t be as perky as an NVMe SSD, it’s well worth doing.