What to do with the data when you change the laptop hard drive

Replacing an old mechanical drive with a very fast solid state drive is one of the best upgrades you can make to a desktop or laptop computer. While it won’t turn your eight-year-old HP into a new Mac M1, you’ll definitely feel and appreciate the difference (especially if you pair it with a little extra RAM, but don’t get too wild).

However, Lifehacker reader Len has a dilemma. You want to know how to get all your data from the old mechanical and mechanical drive of your laptop to the new current of your solid state drive. He writes:

“I bought a 500GB Samsung SATA 6 Gbps SSD to upgrade my old Toshiba laptop. How is the best way to do this and transfer the data from the old drive? “

A storage upgrade is a good time to start over

You may not like my answer, Len, but I think it’s the best: changing the hard drive provides a great excuse to install a new, cluttered version of your operating system, which I assume is Windows 10, but if not, we talked about it, too.

Of course, you can easily clone your entire mechanical drive to your new SSD, but it will require a little more hardware, and you’ll probably end up using it once and forgetting about it.

Replacing your laptop’s hard drive usually means removing the main hard drive and replacing it with a new one (since I can’t think of many laptops with room for a second drive). This is a bit different from a desktop PC, where you can install the new SSD, connect it to the motherboard, and run both drives at once. In this case, you will clone your original drive to the new one, disconnect and remove the old one, and connect the new one using the original SATA connection. In general, your system should boot properly with your new drive and you won’t miss any.

With a laptop, this is a little trickier. You will need a cheap external enclosure or a USB-SATA adapter to connect to the SSD, which will allow you to connect the SSD to the laptop’s USB port. You will then run a disk clone, just like before. Depending on how much data you want to transfer and the USB speeds you’re working with, this can take a while.

What I suggest is that you take advantage of this time to do so audit your laptop data. What is it that you really need? What can you get rid of or download again later, if and when you need it? If you store a lot of iTunes movies on your system for convenience, or if you have a lot of music files that you rarely listen to, you probably don’t need them to eat up space on your laptop.

Whenever possible, transfer data to cloud storage so that it is backed up elsewhere and can only be accessed when needed. Applications and programs? Make a list, save or make a mental note of any specific settings that interest you and do not worry you; you can always reinstall them later.

I try to use my laptop as a simple workstation. When I’m working on something, I try to edit it in the cloud whenever possible. If he has to live on my desk, he goes somewhere else when I just do it, usually back to the cloud, but also to the recycle bin, if necessary.

I have a desktop PC that I treat the same way. Photos and documents go to the cloud; the PC itself is usually the intermediary between the raw materials and the finished product. (I’ve been playing too much Dyson Sphere Program lately.) Stream media content whenever possible instead of storing it for years on the hard drive, or transfer it to a NAS box where I can copy it back to my desktop or wherever I want to access it.

Working this way, the backups are fantastic. I never clone the hard drive again. I just copied the entire Windows user folder to another hard drive (to preserve data such as my wallpapers and my overflowing download folder). If I found any crashing issues with Windows, or even total hard drive wear, I would just reinstall Windows 10 from scratch. Setting it up takes less than an hour, and that includes reinstalling the apps I use every day and my absurd Steam library.

So here’s my suggestion: copy the essential data to the cloud, change the drives, and reinstall Windows on your new one. You’ll have a swell-free operating system that you can then fill in with the data you actually do need.

However, if you have too much data that you just can’t separate yourself from, you’ll need to follow the path I mentioned earlier. Spring for enclosure of the unit—Possibly even a docking station— that supports both 2.5 “and 3.5” units. Connect your SSD, clone your laptop drive on your SSD, and then change the drives. Ara, cling to your old mechanical hard drive. Not only does it have an up-to-date backup of all your files, but you can copy it to the enclosure or docking station and use it as a secondary backup source.

As for the process of replacing the laptop hard drive with an SSD, you haven’t mentioned your exact model, so I can’t give specific directions. Generally, you will need to remove a dashboard or the back of the laptop to access the hard drive. Here is a good introduction to what to see:

I recommend investing in it a set of precision screwdrivers for that sort of thing, but you may not need it if your normal screwdriver is good enough. Be sure to plug in before touching the inside of the laptop (so as not to fry anything with static electricity) and do your best to avoid dropping or losing any of the small screws you deal with. Otherwise, it should not be a very difficult upgrade.

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