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Upgrading Internal Hard Drives In Laptops - The 7 Step Approach

roderickdunne | Jul 9, 2010 |

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Many folk will be surprised to find out that it can be quite an easy to task replace internal hard drives or RAM in laptops. This article looks at the seven simple steps involved in safely upgrading a disk drive.

One drawback in modern computing is that your new laptop drives rapidly fill up with data, music and videos as the broadband capacity and data sizes have increased. Upgrading the internal hard drives of laptops can be easily done using the same drive bay of your computer.

This upgrade not only increases disk capacity but also provides you with faster disk access speeds and reduces the need for additional external drives (when you run out of disk space). On the downside, if you are nervous about damaging the internal components of your laptop then this is best left up to the experts to complete (i.e. a computer service technician).

The seven steps for replacing internal hard drives are as follows:

Do your research before purchasing a new hard drive and check that it is either a universal type or built specifically for your brand.
Clear out the original drive of any files that you won't wish to transfer over. The process of cloning over the data can take a long time (based on the original drives size) so you want to limit the number of files on the existing disk. Remove cached files and unused applications. Do any other computer repair and maintenance tasks you regularly do (e.g. running a virus check).
Run the Windows Disk Defragmenter tool across the original drive. This speeds up disk access times in preparation for the cloning stage.
Turn off the laptop and clone the data over to the new drive. Some applications clone in different ways so check their instructions. If you go for an upgrade kit (e.g. EZ Upgrade Kit) then the cloning software and replacement drive are normally bundled together with full instructions.
Remove the power cable and battery from the battery.
Open up the laptop according to the manufacturer's instructions and swap the internal hard drives.
Close up the laptop, add the battery back in, plug in the power cable and restart Windows.

If this has gone successfully, then the new internal hard drive will be picked up at start-up. Hold on to the original hard drive as a back up or use a drive harness (which some upgrade kits provide) to use the drive as a USB-enabled external storage device.