How to Upgrade Your Laptop’s Hard Drive to a Solid State Drive

Introduction

It’s the tech equivalent of a dead pool. Some pundits claim the days of the hard disk drive (HDD) are numbered, while others insist it has plenty of life left. The HDD—which dates as far back as the mid-1950s—uses magnetically coated platters that spin at high speeds, with read and write heads located so close to the platters that you can’t see the space between with the naked eye. Because of their construction, HDDs are prone to overheating and breakage, sensitive to vibration, and saddled by performance limits due to sheer physics.

Enter the solid state drive (SSD), looming as the technology that deep-sixes the HDD. An SSD has no moving parts, instead using flash memory to store data, much like the USB flash drives so many of us use daily. Because the SSD is not mechanical, it's far less susceptible to the weaknesses that HDDs are. SSDs also tend to consume less power, which means modest improvements to battery life for mobile devices.
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Like any device, SSDs have their speed limitations, but unlike HDDs, the SSD’s limits are not a byproduct of a physical mechanism. Many of today’s SSDs are already capable of faster data transfer rates than mainstream HDDs, with speeds getting faster all the time. In many ways, SSDs simply make more sense than HDDs—especially in laptops.

The trouble is, the mainstream market for SSDs is still in its formative years, with a ways to go before it can overtake the HDD market in terms of cost and storage capacity. For instance, you can find 500GB HDDs for laptops (2.5-inch, 5,400rpm spin rate, Serial ATA interface) selling for less than $80, but you’ll spend more than $300 for a mere 120GB SSD. Manufacturing advances are helping lower SSD costs and increase their capacities, but it will be years before SSDs are truly cost-competitive with HDDs.

Depending on the situation, though, an SSD can be worth the storage-capacity sacrifice and the premium price. For starters, SSDs can give a noticeable performance boost, and for the road warrior or anyone who uses a laptop in an environment where laptops are frequently jostled, an SSD is a wise investment. And swapping out a laptop’s HDD for an SSD results in a quieter-running laptop.

2. Materials Check: What You’ll Need, Part One

In addition to the laptop and an SSD drive, you’ll need a few things on hand (and sorted out) before you get started.

First: Can the laptop’s HDD be upgraded at all? Not every laptop has a user-accessible hard drive. Some compact laptops, such as the Toshiba Satellite E205, and certain other laptop designs (for instance, older Apple MacBook Pros), aren’t designed to allow user-installed drive upgrades. Before you plunk down the cash for an SSD, make sure you'll be able to get inside your laptop at all.

Most SSDs come in the form of 2.5-inch Serial ATA (SATA) drives, so you also need to make sure that your laptop will accept a standard-size 2.5-inch drive and that it uses a SATA interface. Most recent laptops should satisfy these requirements, but if you’re not sure, check your laptop’s documentation or put in a call or an e-mail to the vendor’s support personnel.

The documentation for our laptop didn’t say one way or another if the HDD was replaceable; we’d expect this to be common. But after a little poking around the laptop itself, we confirmed that the hard drive was user-accessible, and that it was a standard 2.5-inch SATA drive, as you see here…

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="550" caption=" Tools. However your laptop’s HDD is installed, it’s most likely secured with screws. Chances are, these will be small (sometimes very small) Phillips-head screws, so gather a couple of appropriate screwdrivers of varying sizes. (The kind from an eyeglass-repair kit might come in handy.) But once again, assess what you’ll need ahead of time, so you don’t find yourself partway through the project, only to be stalled for lack of the right tool. And one warning: Make sure that any tool you use is not magnetized, as it could cause havoc with the delicate internals of your laptop. If the tool can pick up metal screws by touch, don’t use it.You’ll have a bunch of little screws bouncing around during the drive swap, so also keep a container handy to stash them so they don’t roll away. An old yogurt container works great (washed first, please)… Conatiner screw driver"][/caption]

It’s also best to undertake this project on a flat surface with lots of room where you can spread out all the different pieces. And be wary of static electricity—don’t do this project wearing socks without shoes in a carpeted room.

A data-transfer device. You probably have lots of apps and data on your laptop that you want to move over to the SSD. It’s possible to clone the laptop’s HDD to the SSD, so that when the SSD is installed, the laptop’s OS, apps, and files act as though the old HDD is still installed. To do this, you will need some sort of device to help you copy the contents of the HDD to the SSD. If you plan on doing this, however, make sure the SSD has enough room for everything you plan on copying over from the HDD. For instance, even though our 120GB SSD was much smaller than our laptop’s 500GB HDD, only about 28GB of the HDD was being used, so we were fine. But if the HDD contains too much data to copy over to the SSD, you’ll either have to do a lot of pruning before you do the clone, or otherwise do a clean install of the OS, apps, and data on the SSD once it is installed—and limit how much you put on the new drive.

We wanted to clone our laptop’s HDD to the SSD, so the intermediary hardware we chose was a 2.5-inch Vantec NexStar 3 external drive enclosure, which sells for around $40:

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="550" caption="Nextar"][/caption]

To clone the HDD to the SSD, we planned on temporarily putting the SSD into the NexStar 3 drive enclosure, and connecting the enclosure to our laptop over a USB connection. The advantage to using an external drive enclosure is that when you’re done with the project, you can put the HDD that came out of the laptop into the enclosure and use it as an external drive. If you use the NexStar 3, make sure you get the version that works with 2.5-inch SATA drives, not the one for 2.5-inch IDE/PATA drives.

Another option available for transferring data from a laptop’s HDD to an SSD is a USB-to-SATA adapter or kit; these sell for around $20. If you go this route, make sure that the adapter or kit includes a power adapter for sending power to the SSD. Also, some SSD vendors sell SSDs that come as complete upgrade kits, including a data-transfer device and cloning software. The Kingston SSDNow V Series Drive is a good example of this. We’ve seen the 128GB Kingston SSDNow V Series Upgrade Kit Bundle on sale for less than $290.

Cloning software. The last thing you’ll need is the software to clone the HDD’s contents to the SSD. For this task, we used the $49.99 program Acronis True Image Home 2010:



True Image Home actually does a lot more than just cloning. It includes disk-imaging functionality, the ability to let you do incremental backups, and system-recovery features. Once you finish using it for cloning the HDD to the SSD, you can continue using it for your backups, perhaps even backing up to the HDD you removed from the laptop, which now resides in the external drive enclosure.

If you don’t feel like paying $50 for software, however, you can try a free, open-source disk-cloning program called CloneZilla. CloneZilla is not quite as easy to use as Acronis True Image Home, but it will certainly get the job done.

3. Cloning Your Hard Drive, Part One

If you plan on performing a clean install of the OS and apps, you can skip ahead to the installation step. But assuming you want to clone your laptop’s HDD to the SSD, here is how you go about it using True Image Home.

Get the SSD ready for the transfer. The first step is to get the SSD installed into the drive enclosure. As this will be very temporary—just long enough to clone the HDD to the SSD—you don’t need to install any of the screws that mount the SSD to the enclosure’s hard drive caddy, or the screws that secure the drive inside the enclosure. Installation is a simple question of sliding the drive inside, onto the interface connector, and sliding on the cover:



If you don’t install the screws, just be careful handling the enclosure with the drive inside. One absent-minded tilt, and the drive can do a half-Gaynor to the floor.

Connect the external drive. The NexStar 3 has both USB 2.0 and eSATA ports, and it comes with cables for both connection types. Note, though: A drive installed into the enclosure can draw the power it needs to operate from the USB port, but not from the eSATA port. If your laptop has an eSATA port, you will get much faster data-transfer speeds using the eSATA connection instead of the USB connection. If you plan to connect via eSATA, however, you’ll still need to connect the drive to the laptop via USB, in this case to get power to the enclosure. Just make sure to plug the enclosure’s eSATA connection into the laptop first, before you make the USB connection.

While our laptop has an eSATA connection, we chose to use the slower USB connection, to mimic what most users will be using with their laptops:



Make sure the drive is visible to Windows. If the SSD is a brand-new out-of-the-box drive, chances are it will come unformatted. If this is the case, you won’t see a drive volume appear in Windows when you attach the enclosure to your laptop. You can confirm that Windows sees the drive, however, by checking for it in Device Manager. On a Windows 7 system, go to Start > Computer > Properties > Device Manager > Disk drives:



You can also look for the attached drive in Computer Management (Start > Computer > Manage > Storage > Disk Management). You do not need to format the drive, as the clone process will take care of this for you.

Begin the cloning process. Next, assuming you’ve already installed True Image Home, launch the app and choose the Clone Disk option. You can find Clone Disk in two different places: under the Tools & Utilities drop-down menu at the top of the window, and in the Utilities section of the Tools & Utilities tab on the left side of the window:



This opens the Clone Disk Wizard and takes you to the Clone Mode tab. Choose the "Automatic (recommended)" Clone Mode and click Next:



This takes you to the Finish tab. Confirm that the correct destination drive is listed in the Before and After sections. Unless you have more than one unformatted drive attached to your system, True Image Home should automatically pick the correct destination drive. Note that many newer laptops have multiple partitions on them, such as restore partitions. Using the Automatic Clone Mode will automatically duplicate all existing partitions from the HDD to the SSD. If your destination drive is not the same size as the source drive, True Image Home will automatically adjust the partition sizes to best fit on the new drive. If you don’t like the partition sizes that True Image Home picks, you’ll need to click Cancel and instead choose the Manual Clone Mode.

Once all looks good, click Proceed:



The cloning process has begun…

Stay alert during the start of the cloning process. A few moments later, a window will pop up stating that a “Reboot is required.” If you don’t click Reboot within 10 minutes, the cloning procedure will cancel itself, so this not the moment to go brew a pot of coffee:



However, once you click Reboot, making that pot of coffee isn’t a bad idea, because the cloning process will take a while. The actual cloning procedure takes place automatically in a minimalist-looking command-line environment:



My laptop took approximately 36 minutes to clone the HDD’s 28.4GB of data to the SSD via the USB connection.

Wrap up the cloning process. When the clone procedure is complete, a message appears on the screen, instructing you to shut down the computer:



Go ahead and turn off the laptop, then remove the external drive enclosure’s USB connection from the laptop.

Verify cloning was successful. Before you do any physical drive swaps, you should make sure that the cloning process was successful. Make sure that the drive enclosure is not attached to the laptop, turn the laptop back on, and boot into Windows. (If you leave the enclosure connected to the laptop with the now-cloned disk inside, the laptop might unintentionally boot from the drive in the enclosure. It’s not the end of the world if this happens, but you’re better off avoiding this.) Once the laptop has booted into Windows, connect the enclosure back to the laptop, and Windows should now see the SSD.

Take a quick look at the contents of the drive to make sure that it resembles what is on the laptop’s HDD. You can do a simple side-by-side comparison using two Windows Explorer windows:



You might also want to do a quick comparison of the HDD and SSD partitions using Windows’ Computer Management:



If all looks good, shut down the laptop, and move on to the next step for the drive swap.

4. Swapping Out the Drives

Now that the laptop’s HDD has been successfully cloned to the SSD, it’s time to physically install the SSD.

Get access to the laptop’s HDD. Detach the laptop’s power cable and remove the battery before proceeding. If the battery is not removable, then you will just have to continue with the battery installed. Removing the battery is not essential, but it’s a wise precaution, if it's possible.

The Satellite M505-S4020 has two removable doors on its underside, the larger of which provides access to the memory and the hard drive. Consult your laptop’s manual to determine where the HDD is located and how to remove it. It should be similar to what we saw:



I had to loosen three screws (indicated by the arrows above) to pop off the M505-S4020’s larger access door. In our case, the screws stayed attached to the door and did not remove easily, making it easy to keep tabs on them.

Remove the HDD. Within the M505-S4020, the HDD is installed in a cage that sits in the hard drive bay. First, we had to remove the cage, with the drive still attached. This required removing four very small and slippery screws that mount the cage to the drive bay:



Important note: When removing the cage from the bay (as well as the drive from the cage, which we did next), don’t put any downward pressure on the HDD itself. If the screws are tight, you might be tempted to use the drive itself for leverage—but don’t. Too much pressure can damage its delicate innards.

We next had to remove the HDD from the hard drive cage, which required taking out another set of small and easy-to-lose screws. Here's the SSD alongside the cage, once the HDD was out:



If your laptop uses a drive cage, before you remove that last screw, note the orientation of how the HDD is sitting in the cage. You will need to use this same orientation when you install the SSD.

Also, if you haven’t already removed the SSD from the external enclosure following the cloning procedure, now is the time.

Installation is reverse of removal. Now it’s just a matter of reversing the process, this time with the SSD. We installed the SSD into the hard drive cage using the four screws that held the HDD in place:



We then mounted the cage back into the drive bay with the first set of four screws we removed. Finally, we reattached the door with its three screws.

The moment of truth. With the SSD installed and the laptop all buttoned back up, reinsert the battery and power cable, cross your fingers, and power on the laptop. If all goes well, the laptop should boot up exactly as it did when the HDD was installed—probably, though, a bit faster. It’s possible that you might see an error when the laptop boots up for the first time with the SSD installed, requiring you to first go into the system’s BIOS settings to tell it that a different drive is now installed. Additionally, the BIOS’s boot-priority settings might have gotten shuffled, so you might need to readjust that back to your liking, as well. If you're not familiar with how to access your BIOS (your PC's preboot setup menu), look for a message on the bootup screen before your PC enters Windows. It typically involves pressing one of the function keys.

When you boot into Windows for the first time after installing the SSD, you might see a message that Windows has found a new device and is installing the necessary drivers. Windows will then likely tell you to reboot to apply the changes. Go ahead and click Restart Now if you see this message:



When the system boots back into Windows, you shouldn’t see any further messages related to the drive update. You are now good to go. The SSD doesn’t require any special drivers—the drivers it uses are already built into Windows. If you take a gander at Device Manager or Computer Management, you’ll see the SSD listed in place of the original HDD:



You should also confirm that all of your apps and files are where they are supposed to be.

What to do with the old HDD? It would be prudent to set the original HDD aside and not do anything with it for a while—perhaps a week or two. This gives you an insurance policy, so if there is a problem that isn’t readily apparent and things somehow go awry with the SSD, you can always swap the HDD back in. If you wind up doing this, however, note that any changes you make to the contents of the SSD now installed in the laptop (such as documents you created, apps you installed, files you downloaded, or e-mails you sent and received) will not be reflected on the HDD. The HDD only contains what was on it up to the point you removed it from the laptop.

Once you are satisfied that the SSD is operating as expected in the laptop, go ahead and install the original HDD into the drive enclosure. (Attach the screws this time, though!) You can now use it as an external drive



You’ll likely want to reformat the HDD in the enclosure so that you can take advantage of its full storage potential.

5. After the Swap: Test and Verify

With an SSD now installed in your laptop, you might notice some immediate differences. For starters (pun intended), your laptop might boot up faster. Our Satellite M505-S4020’s boot time went from 50 seconds with the HDD down to 25 seconds with the SSD. Also, if your laptop’s HDD was noisy, the eerily silent SSD might take some getting used to. You also might notice some apps loading quicker. In our anecdotal observations, we definitely noted a number of apps loading quicker on the SSD-updated Satellite.

You also might see some overall performance gains. Using our PCMark Vantage test (a synthetic benchmark test of overall PC performance), our laptop’s performance rocketed from a score of 4,951 with the original HDD, up to 7,237 with the SSD—a 46 percent performance boost. We saw noticeable bumps upward in each of PCMark Vantage’s test suites, but we saw the largest increase with the HDD suite. The HDD score skyrocketed from 3,023 to 15,213—a five-fold performance improvement.

Using the ATTO Disk Benchmark, which isolates a system’s disk-subsystem performance, we saw a maximum read transfer rate of 75.5MB per second and a maximum write transfer rate of 74.9MB per second with the original HDD. (That's the chart at left below.) With the SSD installed, both more than doubled (as shown in the chart at right). The read transfer rate topped out at 193MB per second, and the write transfer rate went up to 159.4MB per second:





 

The performance gains we witnessed on these benchmark tests are not necessarily going to appear in every usage scenario, however. For instance, we saw no significant performance gains on our Windows Media Encoder, iTunes conversion, or Cinebench tests. That’s because these tests are mostly CPU-bound and don’t make use of the system’s disk in a major way.

Where you should notice any performance boost is with tasks that are more disk-intensive, such as when copying data or opening large files. It is important to note, however, that there is no guarantee that you will see noticeable performance gains—especially if you opt for an entry-level SSD. So before you opt for an SSD upgrade, check out our review of the OCZ Agility EX 60GB. It contains quite a few fine points on feature differences among 2010-era SSDs and explains why, indeed, you will get what you pay for.