How to Upgrade Your Laptop's Hard Drive

CNET How To Upgrade your laptop's hard drive. Tom Merritt: When you buy a laptop you usually get the biggest hard drive you can afford right, but at some point it's going to start to seem small, it's probably all those episodes of venture brothers you downloaded, here is how to upgrade your laptop to a bigger hard drive, give yourself some breathing room. First you need to find a hard drive, look online for the best deals obviously you want to pick one with more gigabytes of storage space than the one you have now but pay attention to RPM too, that tells you how fast the hard drive spins and the faster the hard drive the better some programs are going to work especially if you spend a lot of time writing data to the hard drive. I also recommend getting a hard drive in enclosure that way you can clone your current drive and you just put the clone drive in the laptop and boot up that's what I'm going to show how to do. Now if you don't use an enclosure and don't want to buy one you'll have to do a clean install of the operating system on a blank drive and then restore your data from a backup. I'm going to show you the cloning method here, the procedure is pretty much the same for Mac or PC, first you need cloning software. For windows I've got two options Clonezilla is less prone to errors but you have to burn it to CD and boot of it when doing your PC usable for anything else during the cloning process. clonezilla.org Macrium reflect can image the drive while you are still using windows, just don't go changing significant amounts of data while it's running or that data will be lost. macrium.com For Macs carbon copy cloner from bombich software super easy to use and clones the drive well always while OS 10 is running again don't change too much while it's running. bombich.com In both cases you're making a bootable copy of your current hard drive, on to the new drive. Now its time to put the new drive in its enclosure and plug it into the laptop, now launch your preferred program or boot from the CD if you are using clonezilla, make sure you are making a bootable copy and start things off. This can take several hours for larger drives, my 300 gigabyte drive here took four and half hours to image. Once you have the drive copied you'll need to take out your old drive and put in the new one. The procedure varies for different computers I'm going to show you two examples we'll start with the windows machine, make sure the computer is off and unplugged, touch something metal to make sure you don't still carry a charge and this old ThinkPad the hard drive is a slot on the side, you have to actually keep it open like this. You unscrew one screw and the carriage will slide out, and in this one you pull this casing off and you get little tab right there and you should be able to just slide it out. Now you get these little rubber bumpers here on the side they just pull off, they are not actually attached they are not gummed or anything like that. And you'll see there is a carriage almost every laptop hard drive is going to come in some sort of carriage, it's attached by four screws on either side, so you'll need to unscrew those screws and you just pull the hard drive out of the little carriage there is that carriage now I've already got my new hard drive out of its case, so I'm just going to pop that one back in there and you screw it all back up, just the way it was before. Now one thing to make sure of why you are doing this is that you have the pins facing out like that. I've done it before where I put it in the carriage backwards, its easier on this one because they give you this flaps you can remember which side is which, but if a flap like that isn't there, make sure you pay attention to how you screwing it back in. Put your little rubber baby buggy bumpers back on the side here, and again make sure you got those pins start it the right way, slide it back on it should fit in nice you can tuck that flap out of the way reattach the plastic case, screw in the retaining screw because you know you don't want it fall out while you are using your computer and then do it up. It should start just like normal but with a lot more space on the hard drive. Now let switch to a Mac. Again make sure it's off and unplugged and then touch something metal to discharge any static electricity you carry. On this 15 inch Mac book pro the hard drive is underneath. So you're going to slide this little lever to open up this compartment here and your hard drive is right there. Now you'll open this one retaining screw, it actually doesn't come all the way out its embedded in this little black plastic piece, just set that to the side and you got nice little flap here you just pull this open and unhook it from the pin and you'll see there is actually now carriage with the Mac all they do is they give you four Torx T6 screws that's what holds it in the compartment. So if you are going to need a Torx T6 screw driver for this one. You'll unscrew those four screws and in typical Apple style entire carriage is four screws, now I'm actually doesn't you know have to do this but I'm going to pull this tab often reuse it because there is not one on the hard drive I'm replacing it with. So I've pulled that out of the case and then again right into the side of the new hard drive you screw these four T6 screws. Once you got the four screws back in and you can put your new tab if it still got enough stickiness on the side there, and plug this back into the pin holder so that it actually connected and this why you need to through the exercise of the four screws, you can see in here there is four little screw shaped compartments that the screws sit right in, that's how the hard drive is kept stable right there. Once you've got that back in put your retaining wall piece back in the side, it's not T6, remember you are going to have to use both kinds of screwdrivers here, screw it back in, this goes on this side down props there and then as you move the lever close it up, turn it over you might want to plug it in and boot it up it should boot just like normal. Now for your particular laptop you want the consult the manual or website like ifixit.com, but this should give you an idea of how it goes. All we have to do is figure out what you are going to do to fill up all that extra space. I'm Tom Merritt cnet.com. CNET How To.