If you’re sick and tired of your laptop’s slow hard drive, you’re probably ready to ditch it for
an SSD--but can your laptop even take an SSD? In this video I'll show you how to find out.
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It’s true, hard drives in laptops are ancient technology and almost single-handedly make
using your laptop horrible. The problem for you is you’re wondering if your laptop
can even take an SSD at all. The good news for most people
using a laptop made in the last 10 years is that yes, it can take an SSD.
You should know there are two types of SSD sizes in laptops today.
The most popular in the newest laptops are gumstick-sized “M2” or M Dot Two drives.
They’re often the fastest and the smallest. The other variant of SSD is the popular
“2.5-inch” drive. Even though the insides are still chip-based, 2.5-inch SSD drives mimic the
size of a typical laptop hard drive and were made to offer the most compatibility. If your laptop
is being held back by that boat anchor called a hard drive, this is almost always going to be
the type of SSD that you’ll be replacing it with. Some newer laptops, however, may actually support
2.5-inch hard drives and also have a slot for an M.2 drive. This is done by computer companies who
want to offer either a pricier premium M.2 drive or a budget-focused SATA hard drive.
You may even find some newer laptops that come with a low-capacity SSD paired with a high-capacity hard drive.
You’ll typically see this in larger gaming laptops where Windows would run off the SSD,
but games are stored on the hard drive. You may think this setup won’t benefit from an SSD,
but replacing the slower hard drive will make a huge dent in how fast games load.
So how do you know whether your laptop has an SSD, a hard drive or both?
One way is to use Windows 10’s defrag utility. Press the Windows button and start to type
“DFRGUI.” This will start up the Optimize Drive window, which will list the drives installed
the laptop. It should also tell you what kind of drive it is under the Media Type column.
You’ll also want to know a little more about what’s in your laptop before you make any
purchase, so if you want to know the particular model, you can use Windows 10’s Device Manager.
Press the Windows button and the X key simultaneously. Click the entry that
says Device Manager. In the Device Manager, click the entry that says: “Disk Drives.” Yes,
it says Disk Drives even if it’s an SSD, so ignore that part and instead look at the jumble
of letters and numbers for the drives listed in the laptop. This is usually the model number.
Write or copy this down, then search online for the model. If your search skills are up to the
task, you should be able to find out just what kind of drive or drives are in your laptop.
If you find out your laptop has a 1TB hard drive, you know you can replace it with a SATA SSD.
For those wanting to replace a lower-capacity SSD, you’ll want to know what the model is before
replacing it with a higher-capacity model. For SATA SSDs using the 2.5-inch size, simply buy
the 2.5-inch SSD you want. For M.2 drives--you’ll probably want to replace it with a drive that uses
the same interface. One snag you can run into with M.2 on older laptops is whether it uses an M.2
PCIe drive, or an M.2 SATA drive. Yes, M.2 slots can support either SATA or the much faster PCIe.
The risk is unless you know specifically what your laptop supports in its slots,
you may end up with a drive that isn’t compatible. Even more confusing, some laptops may have slots
that support both, or support only one type. Unless you’ve researched what the laptop supports
by browsing forums or the manufacturer’s spec page, you may want to err on the side
of caution by replacing it with the same drive model, but at a higher capacity.
Most laptops made in the last three years should support PCIe SSDs without an issue.
Unfortunately, it’s beyond the scope of this video to tell you how to replace
the drive in your laptop as there are hundreds of different designs.
Fortunately, the YouTube community probably has the step-by-step instructions
for your particular model. Our advice today is that if you
want to make your old laptop sing even better than when it was new, upgrade to an SSD today.