[SOLVED] Upgrading old laptop with an SSD

Aug 5, 2021
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Hello, I have a Alienware 15 r2 with i7 4710HQ, 8gb ram, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M, 931GB TOSHIBA MQ01ABD100. Lately I've been having it slow down and was recommended to upgrade to an SSD. I have the moneys now so its a good time to do it. Can one of y'all recommend me something to stick into my laptop.
 
Solution
Hello, I have a Alienware 15 r2 with i7 4710HQ, 8gb ram, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M, 931GB TOSHIBA MQ01ABD100. Lately I've been having it slow down and was recommended to upgrade to an SSD. I have the moneys now so its a good time to do it. Can one of y'all recommend me something to stick into my laptop.
1TB SATA III SSD.

Samsung 860 EVO or Crucial MX500 would be good choices.

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Hello, I have a Alienware 15 r2 with i7 4710HQ, 8gb ram, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M, 931GB TOSHIBA MQ01ABD100. Lately I've been having it slow down and was recommended to upgrade to an SSD. I have the moneys now so its a good time to do it. Can one of y'all recommend me something to stick into my laptop.
1TB SATA III SSD.

Samsung 860 EVO or Crucial MX500 would be good choices.
 
Solution

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Also, systems don't really become 'slow' over time due to hardware.

Either the current drive is really full and fragmented, or it is a software issue.
The base hardware is still the same.

And SSD, though, is a great bonus for this laptop.
 
Aug 5, 2021
4
0
10
Also, systems don't really become 'slow' over time due to hardware.

Either the current drive is really full and fragmented, or it is a software issue.
The base hardware is still the same.

And SSD, though, is a great bonus for this laptop.
Recently I did a complete fresh windows install on the laptop due to a corrupted os, one of the issues I was having before it became corrupted was that "disk" was always at 100%. Probably some software was the issue back then.
 

ajaz1986

Reputable
Oct 30, 2018
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Having a second drive is a great way to keep your laptop running like the day you first got it. Have an NVME or SSD drive as the main operating system drive to boot from and then a secondary drive for storing all your files and apps.

A lot of people say use HDD for the secondary drive but the TBW on SSDs have come along way and they're a lot more durable now. I use SSD's for both my boot + storage drives in my machine.

Just remember to update a few things like where your browser downloads files to, make a downloads folder on the storage drive. I've gone as far as making an application folder on my storage drive and installing all of my software on there so literally, only my OS is on the boot drive.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Just remember to update a few things like where your browser downloads files to, make a downloads folder on the storage drive. I've gone as far as making an application folder on my storage drive and installing all of my software on there so literally, only my OS is on the boot drive.
Even that is not necessary.
My house systems are all SSD only.
SSD lifespan is no longer a real concern.

The only real redirection is to cause browser downloads to go directly to the NAS box. Only for space issues, and access from multiple systems.
 
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Hello, I have a Alienware 15 r2 with i7 4710HQ, 8gb ram, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M, 931GB TOSHIBA MQ01ABD100. Lately I've been having it slow down and was recommended to upgrade to an SSD. I have the moneys now so its a good time to do it. Can one of y'all recommend me something to stick into my laptop.
How much data is on the hdd?
If your pushing out close to 900GB you might want to think about a 2 disk setup.
 

Annie B

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Jul 21, 2017
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Recently I did a complete fresh windows install on the laptop due to a corrupted os, one of the issues I was having before it became corrupted was that "disk" was always at 100%. Probably some software was the issue back then.

I have recently had problems with my laptop where the hard drive was frequently running at 100% read write capacity (storage capacity was only about 50% full), Basically the hard drive was working very hard and everything I tried to do was freezing. Reinstalling Windows didn't help, chucking out unwanted files and clearing browser cache etc didn't help. Eventually the hard drive failed. Thankfully I managed to back up my data shortly before that happened.

If your hard drive isn't completely full, but is running at 100% capacity as seen in Task Manager it could be in the process of failing. '100% capacity' in Task Manager means it's trying to find the data constantly but cannot find it, possibly due to multiple disk errors and bad blocks, so it keeps on searching for ever.

Make a fresh copy of all your data immediately if you haven't already done so, including your email client default profile. I don't use Backup software as I have found in the past that most of my folders were empty when I came to reinstall them (aaaargh!) so this time I dragged all my files and the default email client profile to an external drive. Took me a while to copy 1TB!

Within days the SSHD (SATA hybrid) hard drive started to crash. Eventually got a blue screen. Unable to repair - it wasn't the Windows OS. Windows internal disk check couldn't find any disk errors (???), but another( external) disk check program found the disk was packed with errors and bad blocks.

I am now waiting for a new NVMe SSD to arrive. Thankfully I have an old laptop to use in the meantime (am writing this post on it now). Just wanted to pass this info to you in case something similar is happening to your hard drive. Fingers crossed it isn't, but I just wanted to give you the benefit of my lesson!!
 
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