Question Trying to upgrade ASUS laptop K51IO/K70IO series to SSD. Many questions

[regressist]

Hi all,

sorry for my stupid questions but it is the first time I am trying to upgrade an HD to SSD.

I have an old (2010) Asus laptop, K51IO/K70IO series, according to the device manager I have an Hitachi HTS543232L9A hard disk; looking on internet it is described as SATA II 320GB 5400R 2.5" HDD. I asked also Asus and the answer was SATA [without II] 320GB 5400R 2.5". It is ridiculous but due to its age Asus is not able to tell me what is the limitation in terms of GB for an upgrade. Questions:
0) Does anybody know what is the HD maximum size for the ASUS K51IO/K70IO ?
1) Is SATA 2.5" univocally defined in terms of interface, pins, power etc? I am not able to find its thickness 7/9.5mm, would this be relevant? Is the II relevant only for the speed ? Is the Kingston A400 (https://www.kingston.com/en/ssd/a400-solid-state-drive?partnum=sa400s37/480g) acceptable (it is written SATA rev 3.0 with backwards compatibility to SATA Rev. 2.0 (3Gb/s))? I read very bad reviews on the Samsung 870 EVO SATA 2.5” SSD (which Samsung claims to be compatible with SATA 3Gb/s and interface SATA 1,5Gb/s). Crucial (https://www.crucial.com/compatible-upgrade-for/asus/k70io) suggests up to 2TB, 7mm with 9.5mm adapter, but they are not reliable, they want to sell, moreover I do not like Crucial since on another PC the SSD failed after little use (unless the pc was sold with an old SSD). Please note that my past experiences with hw were quite bad: I tried twice to upgrade rams but I had to return them in both cases because the pcs crashed. Now I never upgrade rams anymore. Any other suggestions?
2) Barracuda Seagate (https://www.seagate.com/products/hard-drives/barracuda-qlc-ssd/) states that the compatible OSs are windows 8 to 11. I thought that the OS should not be relevant
3) Cloning problem: the laptop has Vista Home 32bit, which sw do you suggest for disk cloning? Acronis (Kingston) requires at least Windows 8.1. These people are really strange, 8.1 surely is not recent but I guess many people rejuvenate old PCs, even with XP, they should take this into account. Can you suggest a reliable tool not virus/spyware, possibly free?
4) I read a few posts on the cloning issue and I am confused on the Master Boot record, some people say that you can select a GPT or MBR partition table. I thought that you have to clone the whole disk, including the MBR, otherwise it will not work

Thanks in advance to whomever will answer

 

[Lutfij]

Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

According to this link;
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/643853-REG/ASUS_K70IO_A1_K70IO_A1_Notebook_Computer.html
and using it's specs, you'd see a difference in loading times with an SSD but I think the best course of action would be to drop in the cheapest SATA 2.5" SSD into the laptop. If the laptop's optical drive is also SATA based, you can pick up a secondary storage caddy like this;
https://pt.aliexpress.com/i/3256804573765565.html?gatewayAdapt=glo2bra4itemAdapt
and place another 2.5" in there, that way you have one SSD for the OS, the other can be either an HDD or an SSD.

0| As for capacity, I'd wager to stick to 500GB at most before you run into BIOS limitations.
3| You're over thinking it, that platform will be struggling with anything beyond Windows 7.

 

[regressist]

Thank you Moderator. I agree with 500GB, sounds reasonable. About the cd player I would leave it as is. The laptop at the moment works quite well.
About 3 I was complaining for the little choice on cloning sw, not thinking at all on changing the OS. I would stick with Vista!

 

[Bob.B]

Thank you Moderator. I agree with 500GB, sounds reasonable. About the cd player I would leave it as is. The laptop at the moment works quite well.
About 3 I was complaining for the little choice on cloning sw, not thinking at all on changing the OS. I would stick with Vista!

Some reading.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Win...YAwCIBgGQBgiSBwIxNqAH0Vg&sclient=gws-wiz-serp