Computer Repair Frederick MD Maryland
Frederick Computer Services Best Prices Most Experienced
BEST Upgrade you can do to Any laptop or desktop to make it run Super fast is ADD a SSD "Solid State Hard Drive" They have came down alot in price and you can clone your current hard drive over to ssd. Frederick Computer can do it all for you at the best prices possible and ensure its done correctly!! Your DATA is VERY important and priceless and if you attempt this and arnt trained you can lose all of your files!!!! So please contact Frederick Computer to do this upgrade
Click Here to Contact us
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Frederick Computer on Yahooo
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Google+ Frederick Computer
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It’s the tech equivalent of a dead pool. Some pundits claim the days of the hard disk drive (HDD) are numbered, while others insist it has plenty of life left. The HDD—which dates as far back as the mid-1950s—uses magnetically coated platters that spin at high speeds, with read and write heads located so close to the platters that you can’t see the space between with the naked eye. Because of their construction, HDDs are prone to overheating and breakage, sensitive to vibration, and saddled by performance limits due to sheer physics.
Enter the solid state drive (SSD), looming as the technology that deep-sixes the HDD. An SSD has no moving parts, instead using flash memory to store data, much like the USB flash drives so many of us use daily. Because the SSD is not mechanical, it's far less susceptible to the weaknesses that HDDs are. SSDs also tend to consume less power, which means modest improvements to battery life for mobile devices.
Like any device, SSDs have their speed limitations, but unlike HDDs, the SSD’s limits are not a byproduct of a physical mechanism. Many of today’s SSDs are already capable of faster data transfer rates than mainstream HDDs, with speeds getting faster all the time. In many ways, SSDs simply make more sense than HDDs—especially in laptops.
The trouble is, the mainstream market for SSDs is still in its formative years, with a ways to go before it can overtake the HDD market in terms of cost and storage capacity. For instance, you can find 500GB HDDs for laptops (2.5-inch, 5,400rpm spin rate, Serial ATA interface) selling for less than $80, but you’ll spend more than $300 for a mere 120GB SSD. Manufacturing advances are helping lower SSD costs and increase their capacities, but it will be years before SSDs are truly cost-competitive with HDDs.
Depending on the situation, though, an SSD can be worth the storage-capacity sacrifice and the premium price. For starters, SSDs can give a noticeable performance boost, and for the road warrior or anyone who uses a laptop in an environment where laptops are frequently jostled, an SSD is a wise investment. And swapping out a laptop’s HDD for an SSD results in a quieter-running laptop.
In this Weekend Project, we show you how to upgrade a laptop’s HDD to an SSD—and how to do so without reinstalling the operating system (OS), the programs, or your files.
Materials Check: What You’ll Need, Part One
In addition to the laptop and an SSD drive, you’ll need a few things on hand (and sorted out) before you get started.
First: Can the laptop’s HDD be upgraded at all? Not every laptop has a user-accessible hard drive. Some compact laptops, such as the Toshiba Satellite E205, and certain other laptop designs (for instance, older Apple MacBook Pros), aren’t designed to allow user-installed drive upgrades. Before you plunk down the cash for an SSD, make sure you'll be able to get inside your laptop at all.
Most SSDs come in the form of 2.5-inch Serial ATA (SATA) drives, so you also need to make sure that your laptop will accept a standard-size 2.5-inch drive and that it uses a SATA interface. Most recent laptops should satisfy these requirements, but if you’re not sure, check your laptop’s documentation or put in a call or an e-mail to the vendor’s support personnel.
The documentation for our laptop didn’t say one way or another if the HDD was replaceable; we’d expect this to be common. But after a little poking around the laptop itself, we confirmed that the hard drive was user-accessible, and that it was a standard 2.5-inch SATA drive, as you see here…
How to Upgrade Your Laptop’s Hard Drive to a Solid State Drive
3. Materials Check: What You’ll Need, Part Two
A data-transfer device. You probably have lots of apps and data on your laptop that you want to move over to the SSD. It’s possible to clone the laptop’s HDD to the SSD, so that when the SSD is installed, the laptop’s OS, apps, and files act as though the old HDD is still installed. To do this, you will need some sort of device to help you copy the contents of the HDD to the SSD. If you plan on doing this, however, make sure the SSD has enough room for everything you plan on copying over from the HDD. For instance, even though our 120GB SSD was much smaller than our laptop’s 500GB HDD, only about 28GB of the HDD was being used, so we were fine. But if the HDD contains too much data to copy over to the SSD, you’ll either have to do a lot of pruning before you do the clone, or otherwise do a clean install of the OS, apps, and data on the SSD once it is installed—and limit how much you put on the new drive.
We wanted to clone our laptop’s HDD to the SSD, so the intermediary hardware we chose was a 2.5-inch Vantec NexStar 3 external drive enclosure, which sells for around $40:
**To clone the HDD to the SSD, we planned on temporarily putting the SSD into the NexStar 3 drive enclosure, and connecting the enclosure to our laptop over a USB connection. The advantage to using an external drive enclosure is that when you’re done with the project, you can put the HDD that came out of the laptop into the enclosure and use it as an external drive. If you use the NexStar 3, make sure you get the version that works with 2.5-inch SATA drives, not the one for 2.5-inch IDE/PATA drives.
Another option available for transferring data from a laptop’s HDD to an SSD is a USB-to-SATA adapter or kit; these sell for around $20. If you go this route, make sure that the adapter or kit includes a power adapter for sending power to the SSD. Also, some SSD vendors sell SSDs that come as complete upgrade kits, including a data-transfer device and cloning software. The Kingston SSDNow V Series Drive is a good example of this. We’ve seen the 128GB Kingston SSDNow V Series Upgrade Kit Bundle on sale for less than $290.
Cloning software. The last thing you’ll need is the software to clone the HDD’s contents to the SSD. For this task, we used the $49.99 program Acronis True Image Home 2010:
True Image Home actually does a lot more than just cloning. It includes disk-imaging functionality, the ability to let you do incremental backups, and system-recovery features. Once you finish using it for cloning the HDD to the SSD, you can continue using it for your backups, perhaps even backing up to the HDD you removed from the laptop, which now resides in the external drive enclosure.
If you don’t feel like paying $50 for software, however, you can try a free, open-source disk-cloning program called CloneZilla. CloneZilla is not quite as easy to use as Acronis True Image Home, but it will certainly get the job done.
Computer Repair Frederick MD Maryland
Frederick Computer Services Best Prices Most Experienced
BEST Upgrade you can do to Any laptop or desktop to make it run Super fast is ADD a SSD "Solid State Hard Drive" They have came down alot in price and you can clone your current hard drive over to ssd. Frederick Computer can do it all for you at the best prices possible and ensure its done correctly!! Your DATA is VERY important and priceless and if you attempt this and arnt trained you can lose all of your files!!!! So please contact Frederick Computer to do this upgrade Click Here to Contact us
or here: Frederick Computer on Yahooo
or Google+ Frederick Computer
Yelp Frederick Computer
Google Maps:
Google Map 2
Bing Map
Facebook Computer Repair
It’s the tech equivalent of a dead pool. Some pundits claim the days of the hard disk drive (HDD) are numbered, while others insist it has plenty of life left. The HDD—which dates as far back as the mid-1950s—uses magnetically coated platters that spin at high speeds, with read and write heads located so close to the platters that you can’t see the space between with the naked eye. Because of their construction, HDDs are prone to overheating and breakage, sensitive to vibration, and saddled by performance limits due to sheer physics.
Enter the solid state drive (SSD), looming as the technology that deep-sixes the HDD. An SSD has no moving parts, instead using flash memory to store data, much like the USB flash drives so many of us use daily. Because the SSD is not mechanical, it's far less susceptible to the weaknesses that HDDs are. SSDs also tend to consume less power, which means modest improvements to battery life for mobile devices.
Like any device, SSDs have their speed limitations, but unlike HDDs, the SSD’s limits are not a byproduct of a physical mechanism. Many of today’s SSDs are already capable of faster data transfer rates than mainstream HDDs, with speeds getting faster all the time. In many ways, SSDs simply make more sense than HDDs—especially in laptops.
The trouble is, the mainstream market for SSDs is still in its formative years, with a ways to go before it can overtake the HDD market in terms of cost and storage capacity. For instance, you can find 500GB HDDs for laptops (2.5-inch, 5,400rpm spin rate, Serial ATA interface) selling for less than $80, but you’ll spend more than $300 for a mere 120GB SSD. Manufacturing advances are helping lower SSD costs and increase their capacities, but it will be years before SSDs are truly cost-competitive with HDDs.
Depending on the situation, though, an SSD can be worth the storage-capacity sacrifice and the premium price. For starters, SSDs can give a noticeable performance boost, and for the road warrior or anyone who uses a laptop in an environment where laptops are frequently jostled, an SSD is a wise investment. And swapping out a laptop’s HDD for an SSD results in a quieter-running laptop.
In this Weekend Project, we show you how to upgrade a laptop’s HDD to an SSD—and how to do so without reinstalling the operating system (OS), the programs, or your files.
Materials Check: What You’ll Need, Part One
In addition to the laptop and an SSD drive, you’ll need a few things on hand (and sorted out) before you get started.
First: Can the laptop’s HDD be upgraded at all? Not every laptop has a user-accessible hard drive. Some compact laptops, such as the Toshiba Satellite E205, and certain other laptop designs (for instance, older Apple MacBook Pros), aren’t designed to allow user-installed drive upgrades. Before you plunk down the cash for an SSD, make sure you'll be able to get inside your laptop at all.
Most SSDs come in the form of 2.5-inch Serial ATA (SATA) drives, so you also need to make sure that your laptop will accept a standard-size 2.5-inch drive and that it uses a SATA interface. Most recent laptops should satisfy these requirements, but if you’re not sure, check your laptop’s documentation or put in a call or an e-mail to the vendor’s support personnel.
The documentation for our laptop didn’t say one way or another if the HDD was replaceable; we’d expect this to be common. But after a little poking around the laptop itself, we confirmed that the hard drive was user-accessible, and that it was a standard 2.5-inch SATA drive, as you see here…
How to Upgrade Your Laptop’s Hard Drive to a Solid State Drive
3. Materials Check: What You’ll Need, Part Two
A data-transfer device. You probably have lots of apps and data on your laptop that you want to move over to the SSD. It’s possible to clone the laptop’s HDD to the SSD, so that when the SSD is installed, the laptop’s OS, apps, and files act as though the old HDD is still installed. To do this, you will need some sort of device to help you copy the contents of the HDD to the SSD. If you plan on doing this, however, make sure the SSD has enough room for everything you plan on copying over from the HDD. For instance, even though our 120GB SSD was much smaller than our laptop’s 500GB HDD, only about 28GB of the HDD was being used, so we were fine. But if the HDD contains too much data to copy over to the SSD, you’ll either have to do a lot of pruning before you do the clone, or otherwise do a clean install of the OS, apps, and data on the SSD once it is installed—and limit how much you put on the new drive.
We wanted to clone our laptop’s HDD to the SSD, so the intermediary hardware we chose was a 2.5-inch Vantec NexStar 3 external drive enclosure, which sells for around $40:
**To clone the HDD to the SSD, we planned on temporarily putting the SSD into the NexStar 3 drive enclosure, and connecting the enclosure to our laptop over a USB connection. The advantage to using an external drive enclosure is that when you’re done with the project, you can put the HDD that came out of the laptop into the enclosure and use it as an external drive. If you use the NexStar 3, make sure you get the version that works with 2.5-inch SATA drives, not the one for 2.5-inch IDE/PATA drives.
Another option available for transferring data from a laptop’s HDD to an SSD is a USB-to-SATA adapter or kit; these sell for around $20. If you go this route, make sure that the adapter or kit includes a power adapter for sending power to the SSD. Also, some SSD vendors sell SSDs that come as complete upgrade kits, including a data-transfer device and cloning software. The Kingston SSDNow V Series Drive is a good example of this. We’ve seen the 128GB Kingston SSDNow V Series Upgrade Kit Bundle on sale for less than $290.
Cloning software. The last thing you’ll need is the software to clone the HDD’s contents to the SSD. For this task, we used the $49.99 program Acronis True Image Home 2010:
True Image Home actually does a lot more than just cloning. It includes disk-imaging functionality, the ability to let you do incremental backups, and system-recovery features. Once you finish using it for cloning the HDD to the SSD, you can continue using it for your backups, perhaps even backing up to the HDD you removed from the laptop, which now resides in the external drive enclosure.
If you don’t feel like paying $50 for software, however, you can try a free, open-source disk-cloning program called CloneZilla. CloneZilla is not quite as easy to use as Acronis True Image Home, but it will certainly get the job done.
