I recently bought a new laptop because mine is constantly freezing and not working right.
It has a 1TB hard drive with 8GB of flash memory, so it is a hybrid drive. My understanding is hybrid drives are mostly as quick as SSD but cost less than a SSD.
However my latpop also has an M.2 slot in case I want to add an M.2 SSD. Right now a 500GB SSD goes for about $150.
But I’m short on funds right now, so I’d rather not buy it. I’d rather wait a year or two when I’m in better shape and when 1TB drives are probably closer to $80, and then buy a 1TB SSD for the M.2 slot.
Assume a year or two from now I decide to do that. can I easily transfer all my files from the HDD to the SSD?
If you just mean files and not the OS, yes, it’ll be easy. I’m presuming you have Windows: in this case the new drive will appear as a new physical drive in Windows Explorer, for instance as E: or F: depending on the number of physical drives already installed, and you can copy/move files from the old drive/create folders on the new drive any way you like. But note that you cannot move system files, basically everything that is in C:\Windows and C:\Programs from the system drive: this would wreck the system (but you would be warned by Windows if you tried this, so it’s not easily done accidentally anyway)
Ok, in this case, you got to clone your existing drive with a special program and transfer it to the new drive. As the two posters above mentioned, these programs seem to be provided with SSD drives nowadays. So you got to follow the instructions there. But an additional step you have to take is to change the boot order on your laptop in order to boot from the new drive, and that has been a drag these days since Windows 8 (a procedure which used to be totally simple, but took me at least 30 minutes of googling and finding the specific instructions for my laptop BIOS and the steps you have to take at OS level, which was unnecessary before, when I did it the first time on a Windows 10 machine. But now I’m ranting…)
Put everything except the OS and installed programs on a back-up. Jump drive, old HHD in a separate box attached by USB, etc.
How much you got left? Buy an SSD that is big enough for the OS and the adding of a few programs and clone to that.
Wipe that drive and copy all that other stuff on to you hybrid drive. Save the External as added storage. Sounds like you can fit it all on a 500 GIG drive.
How much faster do you think a loaded down 1T byte drive will be from where you are now?
I have a good ASUS laptop and for me and all those I know, the fastest laptop is slower than the slowest desktop. What are you doing that the small increase in speed is going to help with?
No telling what is going to be along in 2-4 years. If $$ are that tight, I would save bucks and later try to get the next to best thing available at that time. YMMV
The SSD will help with everything that involves reading and writing to drive, so A LOT of performance improvement. A couple of weeks ago I bought an Acer E15 with 1TB HDD running at 5400rpm. Before doing anything, I installed a $90 256GB SSD and moved Windows onto it, and it transformed the performance dramatically - this is the fastest Windows has booted up since 3.1 on my old 486-50Mhz!
Nowadays laptops have processors and RAM running at Ghz, so the typical bottleneck to performance is drive read/write speeds, and SSDs are much faster. If the OP’s laptop supports PCIe (mine’s SATA3), it will almost be like everything’s in RAM.
Short answer: With Windows or MacOS, no. Not without special hardware or a widget that does it for you. For other OSes, maybe.
Long answer: Windows asks your hardware a lot of questions about what it is and what it does and what’s its serial number and its favorite color and its mother’s maiden name, etc. It uses this both to identify the parts in your computer, so it can work them correctly, and also to make sure you’re running Windows on the computer on which it is originally installed, so you can’t just pirate it by cloning a drive. it will throw an absolute temper tantrum and refuse to boot at all if you replace too many things, or one thing that is too important for its liking. You have to phone Microsoft, like on a real telephone that you use to transmit talk-type noises to a fellow human on the other end, to transfer the license and get it unlocked.
I’m not sure about Mac OS, but from what I hear it’s much the same as Windows. You can’t just perform a brain transplant and expect the operating system to work right.
With Linux, yes, you can absolutely do that. I run Lubuntu (with Unity desktop, because I likes all the pretty) and I was a lazy bum the last time I upgraded. I pried the bottoms off of both computers, swapped the hard drives, and the new computer booted up with the old drive, no problem. I should note that this is exactly why I changed everything to Linux in the first place – because I used to work in low-level IT, and if I never have to sit there and watch the progress bar in yet another disk imaging program crawl its way across the screen, it’ll still be too soon.
Quite misleading. Yes, MS does check for hardware changes. But you have to make several changes before you get an alert and have to make one whole whopping phone call.
Assuming the OP isn’t into seriously modding the laptop, a simple change like adding a new SSD and cloning the old HD isn’t going to be a problem.
I just did this upgrade to a brand new laptop two weeks ago, so I checked. Apparently your Windows license is tied to your computer’s MAC ID. When I installed the Crucial m.2 SSD and loaded Windows setup from a USB boot drive, it installed without asking me a thing.
I’ve done lots of “brain transplants” on Macs, both swapping and cloning hard drives. As long as the hardware is compatible it works fine. There was an instance a few years ago where some new MacBooks couldn’t run Snow Leopard. Or more acurately, they could, but they had to be connected to an external monitor because the Snow Leopard video drivers wouldn’t work with the newer built-in display, nothing showed on the built-in screen.
Clone and replace hasn’t been a problem since… forever, I think.
Now, the actual cloning process with a laptop might be tricky. No laptop I know of since the very early 2000s has had provisions for plugging two hard drives into the machine at the same time. There’s only one SATA connector, in the hard drive bay.
I was thinking about doing this for a time, and I was going to buy a USB-to-SATA connector cable to plug the new SSD into the laptop externally, just long enough to clone the still-internal hard drive, and then swap out the HD and swap in the SSD. And then put the cloning cable away for the next time I need to do something like that.
Cloning cables are pretty inexpensive. I haven’t been able to find one for more than $30, and the bare-bones ones suitable for just USB and just SATA are less than $10.
I’ve done this on a number of Windows computers. I ghost the factory drive to the SDD with the appropriate cable and then swap them out. You need a drive that’s big enough so you don’t use more than half the drive. It needs to be able to swap stuff around for whatever reason.
The OP’s laptop, like mine, has a m.2 slot for a second drive, but you’re right that most cloning is done by using a USB/SATA adapter. There’s also an option with my laptop to remove the DVD drive and connect yet another drive in that bay, for a total of 3 drives; some newer model laptops with m.2 SSDs have two slots for such drives, as the installed drives are usually small and a second slot doesn’t take much space.
Good points. I’ve missed out on the M.2 form factor revolution, so a hole in my erudition fought.
OP, you could even keep the spinning-rust hard drive (reformatted after cloning) as a data drive, I bet. It’s a rare circumstance where more storage capacity is bad.
It’s like closet space - it will fill up. I’m running most things from my m.2 SSD, but the 1TB HDD that the laptop came with is down to 400MB of free space as it fills up with old movies, photos, and other junk going back to the early 90s.