If you buy a new computer, you won’t have much choice when it comes to storage, as virtually all of them will use solid state drives. If you have a somewhat older computer, you should know that replacing your hard drive with an SSD is one of the most interesting upgrades you can make. improve it and extend its life.

There are dozens of articles we’ve brought to you about this hard drive technology that made hard drives obsolete, including an analysis of the best drives on the market and a recent buying guide with all the features a user should know and how to choose. offers. Today we bet on a more practical article where we will remind you of the four steps to effectively replace a hard drive with an SSD.

For instructions. we will focus on a laptop, but it would be just as simple to do it on a desktop and the benefits of installing it in terms of improving energetic performance in any case, when starting the operating system, when opening applications, when recovering from sleep modes or transferring files between internal drives or on external solutions.

1.- Select and buy an SSD

Just a few years ago, the options (offer and price) for purchasing SSDs were almost exclusively via the standard 2.5-inch format and SATA interface. Today, the offer is much broader, connected to the units PCIe occupies most of the new versions and are the recommended format if your computer supports them.

If your laptop has M.2 – PCIe connectors, there is no debate about it, this is the form factor you should buy. The improvement in performance, consumption and weight is remarkable, and you can always use the 2.5″ bay as a secondary drive to increase storage, either with other SATA SSDs or even with old hard drives you have tucked away in the corner.

If you’re going to mount a 2.5-inch SSD, you’ll only need to consider its thickness, though you won’t have a problem as they all come in 9mm or 7mm sizes. As for the capacity, it will depend on your needs and budget.. There are cheap 120GB or 240GB drives if you want to combine them with other drives, and great prices for 500GB or 1TB if you want to mount it as a single drive.

All major SSD manufacturers (WD, Kioxia, Samsung, Kingston…) will offer you a good warranty and performance. They made the NAND flash memories on which they are based cheaper, and this was also passed on to the end customer. Very cheap units can be found in any format and capacity.

2.- Save the data

If the purchase of an SSD is motivated by a hard drive failure, there is not much we can do. Remove it immediately and use specialized tools from the manufacturer or third parties for low-level formatting or others on another computer. If the errors are partial, we will also remove them to try to save the data using recovery apps.

If the hard drive is in use and working well, we need to consider the design before any replacement disk backups. This will depend on the needs of each of them. We see several options:

• The most complete would be total hard disk cloning to preserve the operating system, applications, files and user settings. Many SSD manufacturers offer apps for it, and third-party developers offer free apps. To do this you will need an external drive or direct to SSD with conversion kits and/or cabling that transfers data from USB to the SSD interface, usually SATA.
• If you don’t need a clone, you can use the recovery discs provided by your laptop manufacturer.
• If you don’t have factory recovery discs or want to create your own backups, all current operating systems offer tools to do so Advances which, on the other hand, is a very convenient task that is part of the maintenance of the system itself. There are also good third-party apps that can be used.
• If you are going to perform a clean installation from scratch from the DVD/USB that you have prepared with the operating system, simply check the disk to store your personal files (documents, photos…), which you can archive on any medium or in the cloud storage service you use.

If you need, you can refer to this guide to move Windows from HDD to SSD and keep all data.

3.- Mount the SSD

Once we have saved the data we need and have a bootable disk or a backup copy to install the system on hand, we proceed to assembly. Every laptop is the world, but it checks its back we won’t have too many problems to find the hard drive location.

There are models that have a dedicated opening for the storage unit and others that require the entire lid to be removed. Remove any type of peripheral device connected to the laptop, the power cord, and if applicable, the battery. Check the back and remove the screws to gain access to the inside.

It won’t be hard to find an installed hard drive, as you can see on this MSI Leopard laptop we used as an example. If you chose a SATA SSD, remove the hard drive bracket and replace it with an SSD.

If you decided to install M.2 (because in this case it also has a free slot), it’s even easier, by snapping the SSD into the connector and securing it with a single screw.

It remains to do a little more than reassemble the lid of the laptop, connect the battery, the power cable or the peripherals we have installed.

4.- Configuration, system and data installation

If you used a PCIe SSD and will also keep the hard drive (or other SSD), make sure that PCIe will be the first boot device. This part is configured in BIOS/UEFI.

If you created a clone before, you will only need to boot your computer. If you didn’t clone and opted for a partial backup, you’ll need to install the operating system and/or apps, restore the backup, or install from scratch. This is done the same way with any version of Windows or Linux.

It is recommended after the first launch properly configure the SSD to work on a computer because it has certain peculiarities regarding hard drives. We have already covered some of these in other articles, such as disabling defrags or making sure we have TRIM enabled.

Most SSD manufacturers offer an application for its configuration, which is recommended to activate, because it allows you to configure the unit for optimal performance, view its status, keep the firmware updated or encrypt the data on the disk if we need it.

Do not hesitate. Replacing your hard drive with an SSD will offer you huge benefits, the most direct in the storage section. This type of update can be done on a laptop just like a desktop PC. The use cases are varied. A single PCIe (or SATA) SSD can be connected or shared with other SSDs or hard drives. It is recommended to install the system and main applications on the fastest SSD as the first boot disk. From there, various options open up to cover your computer’s internal storage with warranties.