Kevin Dahl

This documents my experience replacing the primary hard drive in my HP laptop with a solid state drive (SSD). The reason for the upgrade is to improve overall performance of the laptop.

In Dec 2015 I got an HP Envy x360 for Christmas with 1TB Hard Drive, 12GB RAM, and an Intel i7 processor. It came with Windows 10 and works as a laptop or a tablet. Here’s a link to HP’s advertising telling you how great it is. http://store.hp.com/us/en/mdp/Laptops/envy-x360-232003–1. The advertising is very good. It looks wonderful, especially in tablet mode.

I thought it was a good buy, even with the 1TB hard disk that rotates at 5,400 rpm’s. I have a couple of desktops with 32GB memory, 1TB hard disk rated at 7200 rpm. I also bought an SSD for my primary desktop, because with the memory and the i7 processor the bottleneck is the hard drive. What I don’t understand, why does HP go to all the trouble of creating a powerful laptop and then puts in a a slow hard disk negating the performance of extra memory and a faster processor. It’s kind of like taking a race car and putting in an old VW engine. It looks really good and gets you where you want to go, but performance sucks.

Anyway, I got on the internet and found a 1TB hard drive for around $335. It’s a Samsung SSD 850 EVO and I’m pretty happy with the performance. I put the 1TB hard drive in my desktop, and took the 512GB SSD that was in my desktop and put it into my laptop. Myself, I don’t use a laptop that often so the extra hard drive space is needed more on the desktop.

I purchased AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro Edition 6.0 software to help with the migration of the OS from the 1TB hard disk to the 512GB SSD. Be careful when buying the software, I ended up buying AOMEI Dynamic Disk Manager Pro Edition (which I don’t need). When you hit the upgrade button on the AOMEI Partition Assistant to buy the Pro Edition it will take you to a sales page for buying the Disk Manager software. And I couldn’t really find the buy page for the Partition Assistant so I just paid the $44 only later to find out I could have bought just the Partition Assistant for $25. (The company did work with me so I ended up paying $25).

The Partition Assistant Pro Edition is only needed if you’re migrating a GPT hard disk to an SSD, otherwise you can get by with the free standard edition.

The only caveat on migrating the 1TB hard disk to a 512GB SSD is you need to shrink the partition of the 1TB hard disk down to being smaller than the size of the SSD. If they’re both the same size it’s should be fairly straight forward.