Laptop Hard Drive Upgrade

How to: laptop hard drive upgrade

Its best to do a little planning before you begin. I’m going to assume you’re upgrading the current drive, not replacing a broken one. More about that later.

If you’re not a computer professional, you must be comfortable opening up your laptop to replace the old drive with your new big fast drive. If that scares you stop here and call a friend or your local computer shop.

You should go for a larger drive than the current drive, which is probably why you’re here. I strongly suggest you consider buying a 7200 RPM drive for your laptop – why? I just finished upgrading my Dell Inspiron (which was a very basic laptop). It now runs almost 2 times faster! The 7200 RPM drives gets Windows and almost every application running faster. It’s a great way to get more performance for very little increase in cost. I suggest the Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM drives. You can buy them at some retailers (check before you go) or search on-line.

 

Before you begin your laptop hard drive upgrade, you should have:

-          Patience, you don’t want to rush this

-          Backup! Sometimes things can go wrong – is there anything on that laptop you can’t live without? (you should always have a backup anyway)

-          the new disk drive to install

-          software to copy your old disk ( a few suggestions on that)

-          a cheap USB portable (2.5”) external case

-          a grounding strap

Software for copying your old drive

I used a great package from Acronis called Migrate Easy. It automatically scans your old drive and automatically figures out how to copy everything from your old drive so you can just drop in the new drive and go – five stars IMO.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/migrateeasy/

 

Why a Cheap USB portable (2.5”) external case?

This provides a very simple method of connecting the new drive to your system without making a science experiment out of this. I used one for my upgrade and it all went very smoothly.

 

To Begin: (you have patience and a backup done, right?)

 

1. Connect the grounding strap to a ground connection so you don’t zap the disk drive or other electronics before its installed.
2. Install the new drive into the cheap USB portable (2.5”) external case.
3. Now you can connect the USB external drive to your laptop on a USB 2.0 port – important that you connect to a USB 2.0 port, its about 20 times faster than USB 1.1.
4. Install the Acronis software. There are other software packages you can use including Norton Ghost and software provided from the disk drive company. You will need software that can copy to an external USB drive.
5. CAREFULLY follow the software’s instructions for copying a system drive. You need to copy the contents of every disk partition on the old drive. Your software should explain how it handles disk partitions. Pay special attention to things like the source and destination – READ the software prompts, you DON’T want to end up copying the new blank drive onto your old drive, do you?
6. Once the copy process is complete, remove the disk drive from its enclosure.
7. CAREFULLY open the disk drive compartment of your laptop and remove the old drive from your computer. Store it in the electrostatic bag that your new drive came in.
8. Install the new drive into the laptop and assemble the laptop case back together.
9. If everything has gone to plan, your laptop hard drive upgrade is complete and it should run just as it did before – just with more capacity and faster!