If you have a slow laptop, one way to make it faster is to change your hard drives to SSDs. It may not sound like much, but from the ground up, even on the same interface, SSDs can always offer better transfer speeds. You may want to do it because you have little space, and you have seen that an SSD offers you a better price, availability or size.
There are many questions that one can ask when you want to change from main or auxiliary storage. Here we will try to explain it so that you can go from hard drive to SSD in a laptop.
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What are the benefits of going from a hard drive to an SSD in a laptop?
Let's assume that you are going to change a 2,5″ or 3,5″ hard drive to an SSD in a laptop. The first thing we can say is that there will be a noticeable improvement in transfer speed and loads from storage. Due to its physical nature, readers take longer to find the necessary blocks of information, and to collect the information regarding it when the operating system requests it. While an SSD is usually somewhat faster and more efficient.
It should be noted that it depends on the transfer speeds of the motherboard due to the connector with SATA interface, the CPU or the RAM memory. If one of them is slow, can be a bottleneck. As a general rule, you can't go faster than the slowest component, so the speed gain from hard drive to SSD may not be as great.
In most cases, it is highly recommended to change from HDD to SSD in a laptop because if you put the SSD as the load storage of the operating system, Windows, Linux or any other operating system you have, you'll be able to load noticeably faster. About two minutes to ten seconds of charge when turning on the laptop.
Another important factor is that of battery life. Hard drives have a notable problem for laptops, and that is that have moving parts. Those moving parts consume energy. Also, they can be damaged more easily due to the vibrations they have. Since an SSD is a solid unit with nothing to move, less energy is used and with it the battery can last longer.
Can I keep my files from the original hard drive?
Yes. There are cloning software, which make an exact copy of all the files and configuration of a partition from one storage system to another. This is that you can move data from your hard drive to the SSD. This includes the operating system with its key, files, browsing history, installed programs, games...
For this, you may need, before installing the SSD, to use a cloning software, and to buy a external hard drive drive that is compatible with SATA. Once you have it, carry out the cloning process to the SSD that you are going to install. All this must be done before you remove the hard drive and put the SSD in your laptop.
What kind of SSD does it have to be to change a laptop hard drive?
Simply put, it has to be a non-SSD. m.2 form factor. If you search online stores, look for 2,5″ SATA SSDs, which are the same small size as a 2,5″ or 3,5″ laptop hard drive. If it is SATA, the connectors will be the same, with which the installation is as easy as turning off the laptop and removing the battery to eliminate all electrical risks, disconnecting the hard drive that you want to remove and inserting the SSD.
Is it necessary to screw an SSD to the laptop?
While it is highly unlikely that an SSD will deteriorate from mere use if it is not screwed in, it is still recommended to screw an SSD into a laptop. When moving a laptop, if it is not fixed, it could disconnect or receive structural damage to both the laptop and the SSD.
Why can't I use an M.2 on my laptop?
Possibly because, due to its age, it doesn't have a PCIe, NVMe or m.2 port for it. It usually occurs in lower-end laptops and from many years ago. SSDs have been with us for many years, but in a sector such as laptops in which the consumer sector looks a lot out of their pocket if it is only to work with office automation or to study, putting additional ports for storage systems that are expensive for consumers, it is not a priority for manufacturers.
Why is a hard drive a bad choice for a laptop?
As of today, there is only one field in which a hard drive is recommended for a laptop, and that is its storage capacity with respect to its price. Unless you're in a high performance enterprise environment, unless you're freighting storage a lot, it's hardly going to make a difference when storage gets to TB. It is true that going from 1 TB to 2 TB is doubling the storage, epro in an old laptop from which you are removing a hard drive, rare is the use in which it is better to keep a hard drive. Hard drives can also be more damaged in transit and compromise data, and consume more battery power. especially if the battery is several years old, the step up from a hard drive to an SSD in battery life is going to be noticeable.