Cloning a Laptop Hard Disk Drive - Part 2

In the summer of 2016 I described how I cloned a failing HDD on my main laptop.

Three years later and I've repeated the process on the same machine, not because the HDD was failing again, but I wanted to increase the drive storage capacity.  Otherwise, the laptop is still fine, being a high-spec machine when it was bought more than six years ago now - checking current prices for a similar brand new laptop, I would still have needed to spend close to four figures to replace it.   

However, I was getting very close to the 1 TB capacity of the old hard disk, mainly because of the accumulation of an extra three years' worth of work projects.  Additionally, some of the engineering analysis software I use needs a lot of virtual memory space to write temporary files, literally many tens of gigabytes for larger models, so I couldn't allow the file storage to get too close to the disk capacity.

I suppose I could have archived some of the oldest projects to an external HDD to free up some space, but I find it very useful to have the data from these previous projects easily to hand.

I also decided to change the HDD to a solid-state storage device (SSD).  They've come on in leaps and bounds over the last few years, with available capacities now up to 4 TB or so, and the prices have been falling.  My laptop system architecture also allows data transfer at the maximum speed of the SSD - many older laptops will still work with a new SSD, but the data transfer rate may be limited by the motherboard design.

WD solid-state drive - there were other brands available,
 e.g. Samsung, but this was the best deal at the time ...

So I paid just under £200 for a Western Digital 2.5" SSD of 2 TB capacity and repeated the cloning process, this time using free software called AOMEI Partition Assistant, which did the job easily and quite quickly.  I used one of the USB-to-SATA cables I'd bought for the previous cloning job to transfer the data with the HDD still inside the laptop.

Then I just needed to open the laptop case, remove the HDD caddy and swap the drives over.  I tested the laptop to make sure it booted OK before re-assembling everything again.  I had to tweak my operating system set-up so it recognised the additional free disk space, but there are many sources of info on the internet showing how to do this.

For a few pounds, I also bought an external caddy for the HDD I removed, so it's readily available as an additional back-up device.

external HDD caddy kit

And after a month or so of using the laptop since installing the SSD, everything's working fine and the machine runs noticeably faster, especially when booting up, so it was a worthwhile upgrade.