Today, we're going to replace a hard drive with a 2.5" SSD drive in
an eight year old Asus K53E laptop. This Windows 7
laptop originally came with a 500 GB hard drive, but I'd never made
the move to an SSD. In this tutorial, I'll be moving to a 240 GB SSD, so my
use case is to replace a larger drive with a smaller one. But I will touch upon
the things you'd need to do if you were going to a larger SSD. As in a previously
published video, I'll use Macrium Software's free cloning program to
perform the clone. After we clone, the SSD will remain bootable.
With the old hard drive still in the laptop, let's first go to Macrium's website to download
their free cloning software. First search for "Macrium Reflect Free" and click the
link to their website. Since my last video on cloning to an M.2 SSD, the
process for downloading and installing the software has changed slightly, so
I'll go ahead and show the procedure. Click the button for Home Use, which will
pop up a dialog to enter your email. Once you do so, click Continue. Select whether
you want to receive their news, and hit Continue again. You'll receive an email
from Macrium with a link that allows you to download their software. So simply
copy and paste that link into the address bar. Go ahead and click Save, and
once it's been downloaded, locate the file and run it. This is a small stub
application that downloads the actual installer. Click the Run button...
and then, after confirming you've selected the free version, hit Download to save the
Installer to the default download location. On the next dialog box, click
Next, which copies all the setup files... and then once the setup wizard starts,
hit Next again. Accept the end-user license agreement...
then make sure you have the Home version selected. On the next screen, I'll skip
the optional registration of the software... and I'll accept the default
installation location and shortcut. Finally, hit the Finish button to start the actual installation.
Once that completes completes, I can click the Finish button
one last time, which will launch the Macrium Reflect program. Now we need to
physically connect the SSD. There are numerous products on the market that will
help you connect your SSD to a USB port, but the two main types of products
you'll find are 2.5" enclosures like the one you see here,
into which you slide the SSD and then use the USB cable to connect it to the
laptop... or these USB-to-SATA adapters, which just connect to the bare SSD drive
without an enclosure. In this video, I'll use an enclosure manufactured by Sabrent.
The SSD I'll be using is an older PNY model that's 240 GB. You can
use any 2.5" SSD you want - the main purpose of this video is to
simply show you how to upgrade to that SSD. The enclosure that I'm using is a
tool-less model, without the need for any screws or fasteners, so all I need to do
is slide the cover open. With the SATA connector aligned with that of the SSD,
I'll just slide in the drive and replace the cover until it snaps back on - like
this. I'll then take the USB 3 cable and connect it to the side of the enclosure,
as shown here. Finally, I'll plug the other end of the cable into one of the
USB ports on the laptop. Returning to Windows, let's go to the Start menu and
type in "diskmgmt.msc" to start the Disk Management application. You can see
that it does detect the SSD. There's no need to initialize the disk or create
any partitions as Macrium Reflect will take care of that during the cloning
process. So I'll cancel out of this to show you the 500 GB hard drive
with its two partitions - and scrolling down - the uninitialized 240 GB SSD.
After we exit out of Disk Management, you'll see something curious -
the SSD isn't showing up in Macrium Reflect. This is a refresh issue because
we plugged in the USB enclosure after starting the program. So I'll simply exit
and restart it from the Start menu, after which you'll be able to see the 240 GB
SSD, as well as the original hard drive at the top.
Let's now click "Clone this disk."
We can now select the destination disk,
which is the SSD. As I mentioned before, there's only two partitions from the
Windows 7 installation. You may see other partitions depending on your version of
Windows and your laptop. You'll notice that the first partition is very small
relative to the second one, as it's only 100 MB, as opposed to
466 GB for the Windows partition. It's hard to tell the
relative sizes by just looking at the boxes representing the partitions, as
they're obviously not to scale. What you'll want to do is simply drag the
boxes down to the destination disk. Being 466 GB, the
Windows partition obviously won't fit into the remaining space on the
destination, which is 224 GB, but Macrium Reflect will automatically resize
the partition to fit the remaining space, shrinking 466 down to 224. Now if you're
going from a smaller hard drive to a larger SSD, you'll want to expand the
Windows partitions manually. By clicking "Cloned partition properties," you'll be
able to manually control the size of your partition. In my case, I don't have
to worry about this step since Macrium Reflect automatically shrinks the
partition to fit. So I'll cancel out of this. Let's click Next,
where I can choose to schedule the clone. Since this is a one-time operation, I'll
ignore this screen and hit Next.
After reviewing the definition of the clone, we can now click Finish, which will
prompt you to "Run the backup now" and save the definition. Since we're doing
this only once, I'll opt out of saving and then hit OK. Depending on the size and
speed of your drives, the cloning process could take quite some time, so I'll take
a quick break and I'll be right back.
For my configuration, you can see that the
clone took about 37 minutes. Let's click OK, and then Close.
Both partitions have been cloned successfully to the new drive...
and if we start up File Explorer,
you can see that the contents of the drives are the same. We're now prepared
to physically swap the hard drive with the SSD, so I'll need to power off the
computer. Let's close out of all of our programs...
and finally I'll shut down Windows.
With the power off, the first thing I'll do is retrieve the SSD from
the enclosure. Let's unplug the USB cable and dismantle the cover to take out the SSD.
I'll set the drive aside, as well as the enclosure.
Next, let's flip over the laptop.
Fortunately, the Asus has an easy-access
cover that's being held by just two Phillips head screws, so it's relatively
painless to access the hard drive, Of course, your mileage may vary depending
on your laptop. We can slide the cover right off, which I'll set aside.
Here's the memory, and here's the hard drive, which is held in place by four screws.
Let's remove them with a screwdriver, and then slide the entire assembly to the
right by pulling on this plastic tab. There's a metal chassis that we need to
separate from the hard drive, which again is held in place by four screws - so I'll remove those.
Let's now extract the hard drive and replace it with the SSD.
Now it's just a matter of reversing our steps and screwing everything back in.
First the metal frame...
and then sliding the SSD into the SATA port...
then attaching the frame to the laptop...
and finally, sliding the easy-access cover
back on and reapplying the screws.
Make sure to keep your original hard disk in
a safe place, since you can always revert to it by plugging it back in. We can now
flip the laptop right-side up, open it up, and hit the power button.
After you boot into Windows, it may ask you to reboot immediately after logging in.
Upon that second reboot, let's go ahead and launch Disk Management from the Start menu.
We are booting to the 240 GB SSD, as seen in the properties here.
Let's close out of this, and perform a quick test of the SSD with Crystal Disk Mark.
Using the default settings, I'll select All tests and - we'll take a quick coffee break.
We see that we have roughly 420 MB/s read and 311 MB/s
write for the sequential tests, and
approximately 25 read and 60 write for the other three tests.
If we compare the numbers to a test I performed before I swapped out the drives, you can see
there's a significant improvement - even when using an older, garden-variety SSD.
I hope you enjoyed - thanks for watching!