But there’s a bunch of little details that we (and the veteran computer hobbyists reading this) have learned the hard way over years of tinkering. At its most basic a laptop HDD upgrade is simply: open back panel, pull old drive, stick new drive in, boot and install OS and you’re done. Now, before we proceed, let’s highlight one obvious thing: swapping out your laptop drive is not difficult and for veteran computer hobbyists who have been building computers their entire lives the rest of our guide is going to be a bit overkill in the guidance and explanation department. you need a lot of local storage and only have one drive bay) there’s no reason not to upgrade to an SSD. Unless you have a very pressing need to use a mechanical drive in your laptop (e.g. Further, they radically reduce your boot time and, in the process, give older laptops a much needed boost. While solid state drives improve any computer experience (we use them as primary/operating system disks in all our desktop machines too) they’re a match made in heaven for laptops: they’re silent, give off very little heat, consume very little power, and are very shock resistant all thanks to the lack of mechanical guts and moving parts. (Before you run out and buy a drive this second, however, do read ahead to the drive-selection section of the tutorial for some tips on ensuring you get the right drive for your laptop.) For this tutorial we picked up a 250GB SSD for under $100, no coupons, bargain shopping, or sales necessary. SSD prices have been falling for years and it’s now really economical to replace the budget drive that came in your laptop with a radically faster and pretty cheap SSD. That’s exactly where we found ourselves, with a dying hard drive throwing up errors left and right, and why we promptly upgraded the drive in our work laptop.Īside from the obvious replacing-the-dying-drive scenario, there is the upgrading-to-an-SSD scenario. The most obvious reason you want to upgrade your laptop hard drive is because the old one is dying (or has already died). Read on as we walk you through the prep work, the installation, and the followup. Upgrading your laptop’s hard drive is a great way to get some extra life out of an old machine (or resurrect a dead one).

Replacing hard drive in dell laptop