The key thing to know from the outset is the specific kind of drive your laptop has inside. So make sure you read the details of your warranty coverage (if it's still in force) before undertaking this process. In that case, sorry, no internal upgrade for you! (Consolation: Check out our guide to the best external SSDs.)Īgain, we should stress that nowadays even looking in the direction of your laptop with a screwdriver in our hand might mean voiding your warranty. Also, in some cases, the laptop will have neither a 2.5-inch drive nor M.2 drive: The SSD will be soldered to the motherboard itself. While M.2 drives are great as space conservers, it can be trickier to figure out how to replace them. In most cases, an M.2 drive will use the PCI Express bus and employ a speed-up technique called NVMe otherwise, it will use the conventional Serial ATA (SATA) bus. Instead, what you may find inside will be an M.2 solid-state drive, which is a tiny sliver of a drive shaped like a stick of gum. To accommodate the demand for thinner machines, manufacturers have moved almost fully away from 2.5-inch SSDs, which are the same size as the hard drives they replace. In this same vein, the other recent issue with laptop storage upgrades: As more and more machines move toward thin, light profiles, so do the drive themselves. ![]() The chassis might use proprietary or uncommon screws that have no civilian screwdriver equivalent, or the back might be sealed to the front in such a way that the only way inside is with a specialized process or tool only the manufacturer's repair team is privy to. Don't pry at the laptop's bits at random.Īlas, the trend with many manufacturers in recent years has been to make it either difficult or impossible to access the parts inside the laptop on your own. So doing your homework before buying-or doing anything else, for that matter-is key. Laptops vary wildly in how easy or hard it is to access the main hard drive. The best places to get the skinny on drive access, if you can't find an obvious access hatch yourself from the laptop's outside, are the laptop maker's tech-support site, online forums, YouTube, and documents maintained online by the maker. If that's what you have, count your blessings.) (Some business-focused notebooks, like certain older Lenovo ThinkPads, have a bay on one side that holds the drive, screwed in behind a plastic plate. Some mainstream laptops will afford you access to the hard drive through a bottom hatch, a slide-out bay along the edge, or failing that, by removing the whole bottom panel or perhaps the keyboard. But if it's possible to do the upgrade yourself, here's what you need to know. Some laptops, such as late-model Apple MacBooks and many super-thin ultraportables, are fully sealed and won't give you access to the innards without the help of a service technician (or some serious courage, plus specialized tools). If the hatch happens to say "HDD" or something similar, so much the better. What you need to know is the kind of drive that's inside the laptop now and whether you can get at it easily for a swap.įirst, flip over your laptop and check for a hatch on the underside secured by a small screw or two. Really old models might not have BIOS support for SSDs at all, but a laptop that elderly probably isn't worth upgrading to start with. ![]() If it's just a few years old, it might be able to. You'll need to do some homework to see if your laptop can accept an SSD upgrade in the first place. "SSDs: Okay, where can I get one?" might be your first question. ![]() ![]() Best Hosted Endpoint Protection and Security Software.
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