911 technologyDo you have a technical question to keep you awake at night? We would love to answer! Email [email protected] with “Tech 911” in the subject line.Replacing an old mechanical drive with a super-fast SSD is one of the best upgrades you can make to a desktop or laptop computer. Although it won’t turn your 8-year-old HP into a new Mac M1, you’ll definitely feel and appreciate the difference (especially if you pair it with extra RAM, but don’t get too wild).
However, the Lifehacker reader Len he has a dilemma. He wants to know how to get all his data from the old and faulty mechanical unit of his laptop to the new hotess of his solid state drive. He writes:
“I bought a Samsung SSD 500GB SATA 6Gbps to upgrade my old Toshiba laptop. How is the best way to do this and transfer data from the old drive? ”
A storage upgrade is a great time to start over
You may not like my answer, Len, but I think it’s best: Disconnecting your hard drive is a great excuse to install a fresh, declined version of your operating system – which I assume is Windows 10 , what if not , we talked about this, also.
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Sure, you can easily clone the entire mechanical drive to your new SSD, but it will require a bit more hardware and you’ll probably end up using it once and forgetting.
Replacing your laptop’s hard drive usually means removing the primary hard drive and inserting a new one (because I can’t think of many laptops with space for the second drive). It’s a little different from a typical desktop computer, where you can install the new SSD, connect it to the motherboard, and run both drives simultaneously. In this case, you would clone the original drive to the new drive, disconnect and remove the old one, and connect the new one using the original SATA connection. In general, your system should boot very well with the new drive and you will not be missed.
With a laptop, this becomes a little more complicated. You will need a cheap external case or a USB-SATA adapter to connect to the SSD, allowing you to connect your SSD to the laptop’s USB port. You will then run a disk clone, just like before. Depending on how much data needs to be transferred and the USB speed you are working with, this may take some time.
What I suggest you do is allocate this time audits laptop data. What are you doing really need? Why can you download or re-download it later, if and when you need it? If you store a bunch of iTunes movies on your system for convenience, 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 data to cloud storage so that it is copied elsewhere and can only be accessed when needed. Applications and programs? Make a list, save or make a mental note of any specific settings that interest you and don’t worry about them; you can reinstall them at any time later.
I try to use my laptop as a simple workstation. When I’m working on something, I try to edit it in the cloud when possible. If it has to live on my desktop, it goes elsewhere when I’m done with it – usually back to the cloud, but also the recycle bin, if necessary.
I have a desktop computer that I treat the same way. Photos and documents go to the cloud; The PC itself is generally the intermediary between the raw materials and the finished product. (I played too much The Dyson Sphere program lately.) I’m streaming my media whenever possible, rather than storing it for years on my hard drive, or transferring it to a NAS box where I can copy it back to my desktop or anywhere I want to access it.
Working this way, backups are very simple. I never clone my hard drive again. I just copy my entire Windows user folder to another hard drive (to keep data such as wallpapers and the overflowing downloads folder). If I had a crashing problem with Windows or even a total melting of the hard drive, I would reinstall 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 here’s my suggestion: Copy your essential data to the cloud, change drives, and reinstall Windows on your new one. You will have a swell-free operating system that you can fill with the data you really have need.
However, if you have too much data that you simply cannot part with, you will need to go the route I mentioned earlier. Spring for a drive housing– possibly even a docking station – which supports both 2.5 “and 3.5” disks. Connect your SSD, clone the laptop drive on your SSD, then change the drives. Now, hold on to your old mechanical hard drive. Not only does it have a current backup of all your files, but you can drag it to your case or dock and use it as a secondary backup source in the future.
Regarding the process of replacing your laptop’s hard drive with an SSD, you didn’t mention the exact model, so I can’t give specific instructions. Generally, you will need to remove a panel or the entire back of the laptop to access the hard drive. Here is a good handbook on what is involved:
I recommend you invest in a set of precision screwdrivers for this kind of thing, but you may not need it if the ordinary screwdriver is good enough. Make sure you’re grounded before touching the inside of the laptop (so you don’t fry anything with static electricity) and do your best to avoid dropping or moving any of the tiny screws you’ll be dealing with. Otherwise, it should not be a very difficult upgrade.
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