Swapping laptop hard drive for SSD?

[tight fart]

My sons laptop is getting a bit slow so looking to swap the hard drive to a SSD.
All my google searches seem to bring up advertising web sites, could any of
You recommend a good source. It’s a HP laptop and he wants to go to a 240gb drive.

[mmm-five]

Assuming it's a 2.5" SATA HD that's being replaced, then 500GB drives are only about 20% more than 250GB drives, so you may as well go for a 500GB one...such as the Crucial MX500 at £34 (vs £25 for the 250GB).

Crucial MX500 500GB

If that's too much, then there's the budget BX500 at £25 for 480GB

The main difference is the MX500 has a 512MB of SLC cache to speed up some operations, whereas the BX500 has no cache.

[QJumper]

Once I've decided on a make and model, I've always found Amazon as good a place as any to buy from.

[poppopbangbang]

Samsung 870 Evo's are on some sort of promotion at Argos at the moment, sub £30 for 250GB - https://www.argos.co.uk/product/9401349?istCompany...

They're as bomb proof and as fast as 2.5" SATA SSDs get.

[nebpor]

Get a Samsung Evo as said above. Nice and reliable. SSDs are one thing never to cheap out on

If 250GB is enough, no point in buying bigger, unless he’s storing lots of media on it.

[xeny]

nebpor said:

If 250GB is enough, no point in buying bigger, unless he’s storing lots of media on it.

250GB doesn't go far, and mostly full SSDs are significantly slower. If you're going to keep the laptop for any length of time, or might repurpose the SSD, 500GB is probably a better option.

[megaphone]

I get my kit from eBuyer. https://www.ebuyer.com/store/Storage/cat/Hard-Driv...

[S6PNJ]

I buy my SSDs from https://www.mymemory.co.uk/memory/data-storage/ssd...

[StressedEric]

I have just done this myself.

I bought a Samsung 870 QVO 1TB from Amazon

Easy to migrate a clone of your current drive onto the new one with the free Samsung migration tool.

However for a laptop clone migration, you need one of these:

[nebpor]

xeny said:

250GB doesn't go far, and mostly full SSDs are significantly slower. If you're going to keep the laptop for any length of time, or might repurpose the SSD, 500GB is probably a better option.

Thanks - I didn't appreciate the speed drop-off on a full SSD ... just did a google and educated myself.

[S6PNJ]

Check to see if your son's laptop can take an nvme drive - faster than a 2.5" SSD. Ebuyer has a 1Tb for sale on their ebay outlet with the Jan discount code (JAN10 if it is still working), comes to less than £50 - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/363980332398

[tight fart]

Thanks everyone, he’s gone with the mx500 recommended above. Hopefully it will be an easy swap.

[SteveKTMer]

tight fart said:

Thanks everyone, he’s gone with the mx500 recommended above. Hopefully it will be an easy swap.

I usually recommend Samsung SSDs, bit late to say now, sorry, as they work with the free download of their migration software which does the whole transfer for you. https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/memory-storage/...

You just need the USB to SATA adapter mentioned above which is about £6.

Some really old laptops don't supply enough current from the USB ports to power a SSD, in which case you just use a USB 3 hub with an external power supply.

[RVB]

SteveKTMer said:

I usually recommend Samsung SSDs, bit late to say now, sorry, as they work with the free download of their migration software which does the whole transfer for you. https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/memory-storage/...

You just need the USB to SATA adapter mentioned above which is about £6.

Some really old laptops don't supply enough current from the USB ports to power a SSD, in which case you just use a USB 3 hub with an external power supply.

A bit late for my 2p worth but for the last couple of years I've been running two almost identical computers for almost identical tasks, one with a Samsung Evo 860 1TB and the other with a Crucial MX500 1TB.
Both SSDs still have over 90% of their life remaining (Crystaldisk) but for the last few months I've been finding the Crucial SSD is frequently suffering from hesitation - sometimes several seconds - before loading files.

I've always been a fan of Samsung for long-term, steady, consistent, reliable performance and this has reinforced that belief.