Should I upgrade to an ssd?

[Mezorno]

I purchased a second hand laptop a few weeks ago, and while the specs are impressive for day to day use (6700HQ, 16gb of ram, 970m), it feels pretty slugish. I don't have an ssd installed (but there is a sata m.2 slot available), would this make the laptop generally faster?

 

[profoundnoah]

Yes, it would. I would look into contacting the manufacturer of the laptop about transferring the OS to said SSD. You don't need a ridiculously fast M.2 SSD (doesn't have to be NVME, you won't see a huge difference between the two), just refer to the specs of your laptop to ensure everything is compatible.

 

[raisonjohn]

If your second hand laptop only has an HDD (Hard Disk Drive), then, yes, the difference in performance between an HDD and an SSD (Solid State Drive) is like night and day.

M.2 is just a form factor. Do note that there are generally two interfaces used in an M.2 slot - a SATA-based M.2, or a PCIe-based (NVMe) M.2.

The SATA-based M.2 has a bandwidth similar to an SSD plugged into a regular SATA port (for SATA3.0, that's only about 0.6GBps), but, a PCIe-based M.2 has significantly more bandwidth (for PCIe3.0 x4, that's ~3.9GBps).

So, if your laptop already has a regular 2.5" SSD interfacing with the laptop motherboard via SATA connecction (not in an M.2 form factor), then, plugging a SATA-based M.2 SSD would generally have the same performance, it's just the form factor that is different.

Also, you can't use faster NVMe (PCIe-based M.2 SSD) if the M.2 slot only supports SATA-based M.2, so, check specifications with the laptop manufacturer prior to purchasing.