Your next step is to decide whether you want to transfer your operating system to the new drive or just do a clean installation and start fresh. You’ve purchased your new drive, and you’re ready to install it. Step Two: Decide Whether to Transfer Your Operating System or Perform a Clean Installation Upgrading those drives will probably void your warranty, and you’ll need to look for a model-specific guide, like this one on iFixIt. 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. Cheaper, bulkier laptops, and few business-class designs like Lenovo’s ThinkPads or Dell’s Latitudes, still allow access fairly easily. 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. As they’ve gotten smaller and sleeker, laptops have also gotten harder to upgrade. Some laptops, like Macbooks, use an M.2 storage drive that requires advanced, model-specific instructions for replacement.
If you’re interested in the M.2 drives, you’ll have to determine whether your PC supports them. Instead of connecting to your motherboard via a SATA cable the way regular drives do, M.2 drives get plugged into a specialized slot. These drives actually look more like a stick of RAM than a hard drive. RELATED: What Is the M.2 Expansion Slot, and How Can I Use It?Īnd speaking of SSDs, there is one more form factor to talk about: the M.2 standard. That’s what size you’ll use whether you’re mounting it in a desktop or laptop. 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.
If yours doesn’t, you’ll need a mounting bracket like this one. Some desktop PCs have built in mounting points for 2.5″ drives. The possible exception to this are the super-small form factor PCs that can only handle a 2.5″ drive.Ģ.5″ drives are traditionally meant for laptops, but will also fit just fine in a desktop PC. 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. Hard drives typically come in two sizes: 2.5″ and 3.5″.
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