SSD Upgrades

A mechanical hard drive has a physical arm that has to move to the right spot on a spinning platter before it can read anything. A solid-state drive has no moving parts and answers effectively instantly. For the kind of work an operating system does — thousands of small scattered reads — the difference isn't a percentage. It's roughly an order of magnitude.

In practice: a laptop that took three minutes to become usable becomes usable in fifteen seconds. Programs open as you click them. The long unresponsive freezes stop entirely, because they were the drive struggling to keep up rather than the computer thinking.

It is the only upgrade we know of that reliably makes people say their eight-year-old laptop feels newer than the machine they were about to replace it with.

The part people worry about is having to set everything up again. You don't. We clone the existing drive across sector by sector, so what arrives on the new drive is precisely what was on the old one — your files, your programs, your printers, your saved passwords, your desktop arranged the way you like it.

You switch it on and it's the same computer. It's just fast.

We keep your original drive intact until you've confirmed everything is where it should be, so there's always a way back. If you'd like, we'll put it in an enclosure so it becomes a backup drive rather than sitting in a drawer.

Labor is the flat $75. The drive itself depends on capacity: at the time of writing, a 500GB SSD suitable for most laptops runs around $40 to $60, and 1TB around $70 to $110. We'll quote the exact figure before ordering.

On capacity — buy for what you use, not what you might. Most people we see are using well under 250GB despite having a 1TB drive, and the money is better spent elsewhere. We'll check what you're actually using and recommend accordingly. Where the existing drive holds more data than the new one, we sort that out with you before cloning rather than discovering it halfway through.

Nearly all of them. Desktops essentially always. Laptops from roughly the last fifteen years usually have either a standard 2.5-inch bay or an M.2 slot, and often both — in which case you can keep the old drive in place for storage alongside the new one.

The exceptions are some very thin ultrabooks and most Macs from about 2016 onward, where the storage is soldered to the mainboard and cannot be changed by anyone. We'll tell you within minutes of looking at the machine which category yours is in.