HDD to SSD upgrade on Lenovo Laptop
I have a Lenovo G50–70 laptop which came with a 1TB Toshiba HDD. But
unfortunately after 6 years of use the HDD developed a lot of bad
sectors. The situation became so bad that the installed operating system
Windows10 started to crash. I could not understand the problem first.
Tried to repair windows, reinstalled it. But nothing worked. After few
days of usage again the OS would crash. Then I noticed in one of the
disk checking utilities that there were a lot of bad sectors shown. So I
did some search on internet and concluded that there is no way to
repair the bad sectors and if the number of bad sectors is growing then
ultimately the HDD will die. It was time to invest in a new HDD. But
this time I was already thinking of a SSD instead of a mechanical HDD
due to great performance benefits which you get from SSD. Additionally
SSDs are more reliable. You can move your laptop which the disk is
working without any problems. Such an activity in a HDD may result in
problem with the HDD. Again after doing some research finally zeroed in
on the Samsung 860 Evo 250GB 2.5-inch SATA III Internal SSD.
Replacing HDD in Lenovo G50–70 laptop is not very difficult. I looked at some of the Youtube videos and was able to do it myself. Following is the link to one of the videos which helped me.
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| Samsung Solid State Drive |
Replacing HDD in Lenovo G50–70 laptop is not very difficult. I looked at some of the Youtube videos and was able to do it myself. Following is the link to one of the videos which helped me.
Once
the HDD was replaced I used the Windows10 recovery USB stick to
reinstall Windows10. Installation of Windows 10 happened smoothly, but I
was stuck with activation problem for Windows10. It seems the
activation key is stored in the UEFI motherboard for OEM version of
Windows. It took some days for Windows10 to activate itself.
It
has been 1 month now since I have shifted to SSD and I am observing a
big jump in performance of the system. Especially the boot time has come
down to less than 5 seconds without fast boot. With fast boot it is
instantaneous.
Laptop HDD as Secondary Hard Drive with Ubuntu
After
taking the HDD out of laptop I was thinking of putting it to good use.
After all it has 1TB of free space ( with some bad sectors). I thought
of installing Ubuntu on the spare HDD and then thought of having my
laptop boot up to Windows10 or Ubuntu depending on my choice. Then came
the first hurdle. How to use the spare HDD with laptop already having a
SSD in its hard drive slot? Laptops do not have provision to install
more than one hard disk. After researching again on internet I found two
options:
1. Buy an external USB3.0 to SATA cable or a 2.5” Hard disk case with such cable.
First I went with the first choice and bought a Orico 2.5” Hard Drive case
into which the HDD fitted perfectly. This case comes with a USB3.0
cable. I plugged the case into USB3.0 port of laptop and the HDD was
instantly recognized by the laptop. I formatted it, made some partitions
on it and it was good to use.
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| 2.5" Hard Disk Case |
2. Buy a 9mm Hard disk caddy to put into the DVD drive slot of laptop.
After
some days of using the HDD in external enclosure I felt that the data
transfer speed via USB3.0 is slow for the HDD to be used as a bootable
HDD for UBuntu. So I bought Storite 9.5mm Hard Drive Caddy Storite 9.5mm Universal Hard Drive Caddy.
Installation of the laptop HDD happened without any problems into this
HDD caddy. I had to take out the DVD drive from laptop and put this in.
This option turned out to be better than the USB3.0 case one. Data
transfer speeds are much higher and you can carry laptop anywhere with
two hard disks inside without carrying any other attachments.
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| 9.5mm Hard Drive Caddy |