I have a fairly ordinary laptop running Windows 7. There was nothing wrong with it as such, but having a traditional hard disk drive inside meant it was slow, noisy and got too warm.
Having just built a gaming PC with an SSD boot drive and seen the speed increase, I was intrigued as to whether or not I could use one in my laptop. The short answer, yes. The longer answer follows.
The problem with upgrading a laptop to SSD is they only have one internal drive bay, so you are not adding a drive, but replacing the drive. So how do you do that? Well, you need a host desktop PC with two spare drive connectors (in my case SATA) and some disk cloning software.
There are various free disk cloning utilities out there of varying complexity. There is also professional disk cloning software. I looked at both, starting with the free ones. The ones that got the best reviews for results, seemed to be very textual or command line. I wanted something quicker and easier, being no expert on redefining disk partitions and MBRs. One of the professional ones that seemed to get solid positive reviews was Acronis True Image. As I'd never tried cloning a disk before, I had no idea if I should buy this software. The trial version didn't include the disk clone option (at that time).
So what to do? Well, as luck would have it, there was a basic version of the True Image software free to Western Digital disk owners. I downloaded it and installed it on my desktop PC with my original SSD, plus a 1TB WD disk, and temporarily - the laptop's outgoing traditional drive and the blank new SSD. Due to the WD disk being present, it worked fine. The software is great and I recommend it strongly. [I have also used it for redefining VHD partition boundaries, but that's another story, soon to appear on my blog.]
Before you clone the laptop's existing disk to an SSD you have to make sure that the total used space across all partitions/logical drives is at least 20% smaller than the usable size of the whole of the new SSD drive. This allows the migration and means the drive has some working space to keep it happy.
For me, this was not as issue, I had an outgoing 120GB disk with about 40GB used, and an incoming SSD disk of 80GB total. The True Image software redefined the disk from two equal 60GB partitions/logical disks to two equal 40GB partitions/logical disks.
The process took about 40 minutes, which I thought was quick. With significant trepidation I put the SSD into the laptop and booted. Quickly and silently, the Windows log on came up and I logged in. For a minute or two things seemed fine, then the machine kept locking at the hardware level, indicated by not being able to move the mouse in addition to all on-screen images frozen.
I really wasn't sure what was going on. A little panicked I started Googling. It turns out that these SSD drives have internal management software that keeps things healthy, ensuring even disk wear, etc. In order to do it's job, it has to know where the data is and how old it is. Having just written the entire disk via cloning, it had an uphill job of figuring out the status for the entire disk.
Thankfully the solution is easy, once presented with the Windows log on screen, just leave it alone for several hours while the disk figures itself out.
I've had no problems since. The laptop boots and runs faster, make no noise and the battery lasts longer. All in all, a great upgrade for a laptop.
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