Author: Michael Crider / Source: howtogeek.com
A hard drive upgrade is one of the easiest ways to improve your PC, whether you’re looking for more storage or the speed boost an SSD provides. Here’s how to choose and install your new drive.
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Step One: Choosing Your New Drive
Choosing a drive that fits your budgets and does what you need is the first step. These days, your most important choice is between a traditional hard drive or a solid state drive (SSD). But there are few other things to think about, too.
Should You Get Regular Drive, an SSD, or Both?
Here’s the question to ask yourself: do you want more speed or more storage?
Modern SSDs are amazing, and are a worthy upgrade to just about any system. Moving from a regular drive to an SSD improves speed across your system. You PC will start faster, load apps and large files faster, and decrease load times in most games. The trouble is, once you get past a terabyte of storage space, SSDs start to get prohibitively expensive.
Alternately, conventional hard drives are slower, but offer huge amounts of storage relatively cheaply. You can find desktop drives that hold four terabytes—enough to satisfy all but the most demanding of media hoarders—for under $100 USD.
You can also combine the strengths of SSDs and hard drives. If your desktop can handle more than one drive (and most of them can), you can install your operating system on the main SSD for speedy access to programs and essential files, and use a large capacity traditional drive for storing files. This makes an SSD an especially attractive upgrade if you already have a hard drive, since you can move the operating system over and “demote” the hard drive to storage duties.
If money is no object—or if you’re limited to a single drive connection in your laptop—you can spend quite a lot to get a multi-terabyte SSD. But for most people, a smaller SSD combined with a larger hard drive is a great compromise.
What Physical Size Should the Drive Be?
Hard drives typically come in two sizes: 2.5″ and 3.5″. The 3.5″ drives are also known as “full size” or “desktop drives.” Pretty much every desktop PC out there has room for at least one (and sometimes many) 3.5″ drives. The possible exception to this are the super-small form factor PCs that can only handle a 2.5″ drive.
2.5″ drives are traditionally meant for laptops, but will also fit just fine in a desktop PC. Some desktop PCs have built in mounting points for 2.5″ drives. If yours doesn’t, you’ll need a mounting bracket like this one. Note that these are usually labelled as “SSD mounting brackets.” This is because all SSDs in the traditional hard drive form are 2.5″ drives. That’s what size you’ll use whether you’re mounting it in a desktop or laptop.
And speaking of SSDs, there is one more form factor to talk about: the M.2 standard. These drives actually look more like a stick of RAM than a hard drive. Instead of connecting to your motherboard via a SATA cable the way regular drives do, M.2 drives get plugged into a specialized slot. If you’re interested in the M.2 drives, you’ll have to determine whether your PC supports them.
One other note about laptops. As they’ve gotten smaller and sleeker, laptops have also gotten harder to upgrade. Most laptops that aren’t super-tiny still use 2.5″ drives, but they may or may not have a user-accessible drive bay for upgrades. Cheaper, bulkier laptops, and few business-class designs like Lenovo’s ThinkPads or Dell’s Latitudes, still allow access fairly easily. Other models might need some extensive work to get to the drive bay, or may not have access at all, especially if they’ve moved to the expensive M.2 standard. Upgrading those drives will probably void your warranty, and you’ll need to look for a model-specific guide, like this one on iFixIt.
What Connection Do I Need?
All modern 3.5″ and 2.5″ drives use a SATA connection for power and data.
If you’re installing the drive into a desktop PC, the SATA power cable is a 15-pin cable that runs from your PC’s power supply. If your PC only offers the older 4-pin Molex cables, you can buy adapters that work just fine.
The SATA data cable requires that your motherboard support a SATA connection (all modern PCs do). You’ll find them in slightly different configurations. Some (like the one pictured below) have a straight plug on one end and an L-shaped plug on the other end. The L-shaped plug makes it easier to fit into jacks that are closer to other components. Some SATA cables have straight plugs or L-shaped plugs on both ends. You should get SATA cables with your hard drive, but if you’re working in a particularly tight space, be aware that these other options exist.
If you’re installing into a laptop that allows user access, things are easier. You’ll usually be able to plug the drive right into a slot that already has the power and data connections ready—no cables to connect.
One other word on SATA drives. The latest revision to the SATA standard is SATA 3.3, and drives and cables are backwards compatible with older versions. On desktops, you’ll want to make sure that the drive you’re buying is as fast or faster than the connection that your motherboard accepts—most motherboard SATA connections from the last five years have at least 3.0 support. The same goes for the SATA cable you buy. Laptops don’t use SATA cables, so just make sure that the drive you’re upgrading to uses the same SATA revision or newer than the drive it’s replacing.
How Much Storage Do I Need?
This one’s easy: whatever fits your budget. More storage costs more money, no matter what type of drive you’re looking at.
How Fast Does My Drive Need To Be?
The default answer here is “as fast as you can afford.” That said, if you’re upgrading from a hard drive to an SSD, you’re going to be blown away by the speed increase no matter what. So you might not want to splurge on the fastest SSD you can get. Getting more storage on an SSD will be more important to most people than getting more speed.
If you’re buying a regular drive, speed is generally expressed in RPM—the revolutions per minute of the spinning data platters. 5400 RPM is a typical speed for inexpensive drives (especially in 2.5″ form factors), with 7200 RPM drives also being quite common. Some high-performance hard drives are offered at 10,000 RPM, but these have been mostly superseded by faster SSDs.
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