Thankfully, replacingyour old-and-busted drivewith a brand-new drive is one of the easiest upgrades you might make.
Which drive should you get?
SSDs are incredibly quiet, absurdly fast, and barely weigh anything.
Theyre basically HDDs with a little bit of memory.
The drive attempts to shuffle your most-accessed data to the drives memory cache for quicker access.
A majority of your data stays on the slower HDD portion.
I wont be holding my breath.)
Most people should be fine buying the biggest 7,200 RPM drive that fits your budget.
I bought a drive.
How do I install it?
I think that buying a new drive for your system is the hardest part of the entire process.
Once its out of the box and sitting on your desk, installing it is easy.
For this demonstration, Im using my (dust-free) desktop PC.
Installing a new drive on a laptop is even easierif your laptops manufacturer allows it.
Place the drive gently on the antistatic bag while you start preparing your desktop system for entry.
(That sounded a lot worse than I intended.)
Either way, remove both of its side panelsor, if youre lucky, one side panel.
(My NZXT H440 chassis has its easy-to-access drive bays all facing one direction.)
This is where our paths might diverge, because every desktop is different.
Yours might come with pull-out drive trays or drive rails that you attach to each drive individually.
You might even have to screw your drive directly into your cases drive cage.
If you have an SSD, let it use your6 GB/s SATA port(if applicable).
When you do this, youre making an exact replica of your old drives volumes, including their size.
when you land a perfect clone of your original drive on your new drive, power down your machine.
Heck, it’s possible for you to even use both drives at once.
Leave each drives SATA cable connected to to the drive, but swap their connections on your motherboard.
Youre only limited by your imagination (and available space for more drives).
Like I said, you always have options, and it never hurts to have more storage.
