#REPLACING HARD DRIVE IN DELL LAPTOP HOW TO#
#REPLACING HARD DRIVE IN DELL LAPTOP INSTALL#

The second component should be backing up the entire hard drive. This way you have a simple and easy-to-access file backup. In most instances it is sufficient to simply copy all your important files (like the contents of My Documents and other data storage folders) to a flash drive or removable hard drive. This backup should include both a backup of your files and a backup of the entire disk.

#REPLACING HARD DRIVE IN DELL LAPTOP HOW TO#

RELATED: How to Create an Image of Your PC Before Upgrading to Windows 10 This step is especially important if the drive youвЂ™re replacing is experiencing errors you want to capture a perfect copy of the data now so that you can recover as much of it as possible before the drive dies.

#REPLACING HARD DRIVE IN DELL LAPTOP INSTALL#

Backing UpВ Your Original DriveД®ven if you have every intention of starting fresh with a clean install of your current operating system or an upgrade to a newer operating system, we strongly recommend backing up your original drive. You can check out our detailed guide to the process here: How to Upgrade Your Existing Hard Drive in Under an Hour. ItвЂ™s a really low-stress way to upgrade as you keep your OS, all your files, and other than the time it takes to clone the disk and put the new disk in you have no down time. WeвЂ™ve used this technique on many desktops and laptops over they years with great success.

The short of it is that you take your brand new drive, tether it to your laptop with a special USB to SATA cable, and make a perfect 1:1 copy of the old drive to the new drive. If your laptop is currently in good operating condition but youвЂ™d just like to upgrade to a new SSD then the most hassle-free option around is to clone the existing drive to the new drive and then swap them out. But thereвЂ™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 youвЂ™re done. Now, before we proceed, letвЂ™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) thereвЂ™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) theyвЂ™re a match made in heaven for laptops: theyвЂ™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 itвЂ™s now really economical to replace the budget drive that came in your laptop with a radically faster and pretty cheap SSD. ThatвЂ™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.ДЄside 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 laptopвЂ™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