Tech 911Do you have a technical question that keeps you up at night? We are happy to answer it! Email [email protected] with “Tech 911” in the subject line.Replacing an old mechanical drive with a high-speed solid-state drive is one of the best upgrades you can make on a desktop or laptop computer. While it won’t turn your 8-year-old HP into a new M1 Mac, you’ll definitely feel and appreciate the difference (especially if you pair it with some extra RAM, but let’s not get too wild).
However, Lifehacker reader Len has a dilemma. He wants to know how to get all his data from his laptop’s old mechanical drive to the new hotess of his solid state drive. He is writing:
“I bought a Samsung SSD 500GB SATA 6Gbps to upgrade my old Toshiba laptop. How can I best do this and transfer the data from the old drive? “
A storage upgrade is a great time to start over
You might not like my answer, Len, but I think it’s for the best: shutting down your hard drive is a great excuse to install a new, uncluttered version of your operating system – which I assume is Windows 10 is, but if not, we talked about thatalso.
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Sure, you can easily clone your entire mechanical drive to your new SSD, but it takes a little more hardware, and you’ll probably use it once and forget about it.
Replacing your laptop’s hard drive usually means taking out the primary hard drive and inserting a new one (since I can’t think of many laptops with room for a second drive). That’s a bit different from a typical desktop PC, where you can install the new SSD, connect it to your motherboard, and use both drives at the same time. In that case, you would clone your original drive to your new drive, unplug and remove the old one, and plug in the new one using the original SATA connection. Overall, your system should boot just fine with your new drive, and you haven’t missed a moment.
With a laptop this gets a bit trickier. You need an inexpensive external enclosure or USB to SATA adapter to connect to your SSD so that you can connect your SSD to the USB port on your laptop. You will then run a disk clone just like before. Depending on how much data to transfer and the USB speeds you are working with, this can take a while.
Instead, I recommend that you take this time check the data on your laptop. What are you doing really need? What can you later delete or re-download, if and when you need it? For convenience, if you store a lot of iTunes movies on your system or you have a lot of music files that you rarely listen to, you probably don’t need them to eat up space on your laptop.
Where possible, transfer your data to cloud storage so that it is backed up elsewhere and accessible only when needed. Apps and programs? Make a list, save or write down any specific settings you care about, and don’t worry about them; you can always reinstall them later.
I am trying to use my laptop as a simple workstation. When I’m working on something, I try to edit it in the cloud if possible. If it needs to be on my desktop, it goes elsewhere when I’m done with it – usually back to the cloud, but also to the trash if necessary.
I have a desktop PC that I treat the same way. Photos and documents go to the cloud; the pc itself is usually the intermediary between raw materials and the end product. (I’ve played too much Dyson Sphere program I stream my media where possible instead of storing them on my hard drive for years, or I transfer them to a NAS box where she can copy them back to my desktop, or wherever I want to access them to have.
Working this way, backups are a breeze. I never cloned my hard drive again. I just copy my entire Windows user folder to another hard drive (to keep data like my wallpapers and my cluttered Downloads folder). If I ran into a crippling problem with Windows, or even a total hard drive collapse, I would just install Windows 10 from scratch. Setting it up takes less than an hour, and that includes reinstalling the apps I use every day and my absurdly large Steam library.
So that’s my suggestion: copy your essential data to the cloud, swap your drives, and reinstall Windows on your new one. You have a bloat-free operating system that you can then fill with the data you really have need.
However, if you have too much data that you just can’t get rid of, then you should follow the route I mentioned earlier. Spring for one drive enclosure—Possibly even a docking station – supporting both 2.5 “and 3.5” drives. Connect your SSD, clone the drive from your laptop to your SSD and then swap the drives. Now, hold your old mechanical hard drive. Not only does it have a current backup of all your files, but you can store it in the case or dock and use it as a secondary backup source in the future.
As for the process of replacing your laptop’s hard drive with an SSD, you haven’t mentioned your exact model, so I can’t provide specific directions. In general, you will need to remove a panel or the entire back of your laptop to access the hard drive. Here’s a great primer on what’s involved:
I recommend investing in a precision screwdriver set for things like this, but you may not need it if your plain old screwdriver is good enough. Make sure to ground yourself before touching the inside of your laptop (so that you don’t fry anything with static electricity), and do your very best to avoid dropping or mislaid the little screws you have to deal with. Otherwise it shouldn’t be a very difficult upgrade.
Do you have a technical question that keeps you up at night? Tired of troubleshooting your Windows or Mac? Looking for advice on apps, browser extensions or tools to accomplish a particular task? Let us know! Tell us in the comments below or email [email protected].