Increasing Laptop Performance with SSD

I’ve wanted to upgrade my laptop to SDD for a while now. SSDs are faster, more reliable and perform a lot better than standard Hard Drives. This means increased read/write speeds which obviously have benefits for Audio applications. Another up side is that SSDs have no internal moving parts. This means they are less likely to break should you ever drop or knock your laptop.

There are of course some downsides. To get a decent size SDD you need to spend a lot of money. And even if you do have a lot to spend they you will struggle to get a huge amount of space anyway. I wanted to have the best of both worlds; a super fast SDD but not lose the space my 1TB HDD offers. This was going to be tricky given that most laptops only come with 1 HDD bay. But I managed to find a solution.

At the cost of my DVD drive I could install a caddy to house my 1TB HDD and install an SDD in to the main bay of my laptop. Given that I can’t remember when I last used my DVD drive this was instantly the best option.

I was planning on running my OS from the SDD – this would give the best performance possible for applications. This includes writing audio and save data to the drive. My 1TB would house my samples, mp3s movies etc and would mean I still have the ability to store a lot of data on my laptop.

I decided to go for a 128GB SSD – this would give me enough room to run the OS and any additional software I needed to install. SSDs tend to slow down once they start to reach capactity so wanted to make sure this would not be an issue. I also purchased a suitable caddy for my laptop; ensuring the size and connection type were correct.

First of all I needed to remove the access panel on my laptop. This just clicked out and would then reveal the RAM, HDD and Wifi Module. From here it is also possible to unscrew the DVD drive for removal.

Once I removed the HDD I also unscrewed the screw holding the DVD Drive in place.

With the old HDD removed I could now insert the new SSD – this was done by simply slotting the drive in to place.

Next for the DVD drive. With the drive removed I could add the old HDD to the caddy. Again this was easy enough and just required slotting the drive in to the connector.

One thing I wanted to do was to remove the faceplate from the DVD drive and attach it to the caddy. This was a slightly more difficult as there were multiple clips holding the faceplate on. Once removed the plate is easliy clipped on to the caddy.

The caddy can then be slotted in to the DVD drive bay and held in by the screw I removed earlier.

I decided to do a fresh install of the OS on the SSD. This is definitely recommended as Windows treats HDD and SSD installations differently.

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