Prices range from roughly £100 to £200, but you could get a 500GB Samsung 850 EVO from .uk for £119, or a Crucial BX100 for £146.86. Your Studio 17 has a 500GB drive with 50GB free, so you will need a 500GB or larger SSD. However, the main problem is the cost.įor cloning to work, the SSD must be bigger than the HD.
Since you’re using your laptop mostly as a desktop, you will not get all the benefits of an SSD, such as extra battery life.
If so, you can install the SSD before cloning the hard drive. The process should be somewhat easier for you because the Dell Studio 17 has two drive bays, and one should be free. It’s also a good idea to make a Windows start-up/repair DVD in case anything goes wrong. The thing to remember is that you must make a disk-to-disk clone, not just copy the Windows partition. ( Crucial’s kit includes a special USB cable.) However, many back-up programs will do the job, including Acronis True Image, EaseUS To Do and CloneZilla.
Some disk manufactures offer free software with their drives, and some suppliers sell cloning kits. There is plenty of disk cloning software around. For example, a SATA II laptop should work with a 6Gbps SATA III drive, but it will only run at the speed of a cheaper 3Gbps SATA II drive. Later versions of SATA are faster but backwards compatible. (5) Restart the laptop.īefore doing any of that, check that your laptop’s BIOS can support an SSD via AHCI, and find out whether the hard drive is SATA I, II or III. (4) Unscrew the back of the laptop and swap the SSD for the HD.
(3) Close down the laptop, and remove the battery. (2) “Clone” the current HD to the SSD, then unplug it from the laptop. (1) Connect the SSD to your laptop via an eSATA or USB cable or an external caddy. In principle, SSDs are easy to install, as follows. SSDs are also prone to fail, though I believe that, today, they are less likely to fail than HDs. However, SSDs are still much more expensive than HDs for the same amount of storage. They also consume less power, which prolongs battery life. SSDs have no moving parts, so they are impervious to the shocks that can damage hard drives when laptops are bumped around or even dropped. Programs can load data straight from an SSD without having to wait for a hard drive to spin up to speed, or for the read/write head to find the right sector on the platter.
SSDs make your PC start up faster, and programs feel much more responsive. It’s often worth replacing a spinning-platter HD (hard drive) with a chip-based SSD (solid-state drive). For example, hinges break, especially if you lift a laptop by its screen, and power cables fray. Otherwise, many common problems are mechanical ones. Motherboard batteries also tend to fail after five years. Of course, hard drives do become increasingly likely to fail after five to 10 years, but many fail within three years and no doubt some last more than a decade: there’s no easy way to tell.
It’s already running Microsoft Windows 10 with 8GB of memory, so there’s no urgent need to upgrade or replace it. The Dell Studio 17 was a solid desktop replacement laptop with plenty of power but not much portability. Just in case this makes it into your column, can I state for the record I have no interest in Macs or Linux. Rebuilding these links would be very time consuming. This is especially important in ArcMap, where a map file may contain dozens of links to data spread over many different folders. I do have back-ups: I am more concerned with ease of transfer so that programs retain their settings and paths to data if possible. Should I be thinking of replacing the hard drive now? If so, would it be better to pay extra to go down the SSD route? However, if other components are likely to fail, would I be better off replacing the whole thing now?Įither route will obviously entail transferring a large amount of data crucial to my teaching and research. I have no problems with anything, but I am concerned about longevity and component failure.
In my home office, I hook it up to a separate keyboard, mouse and monitor.Īs a part-time university lecturer, I run the usual software – Microsoft Office, Adobe Illustrator etc – plus some specialist software such as ArcMap, part of the ArcGIS suite. My main computer is a Dell Studio 17 laptop from 2010 (specification attached).