Laptop Question

[Mike Henderson]

Yep! There's an empty drive space. Now, which drive to install?

I did some searches for a SATA SSD and WOW! They aren't cheap! A 1TB Samsung 850 runs in the $900 range. I found a Crucial MX300 2TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5 Inch Internal SSD for $400. It gets high ratings on Amazon. Acer used Crucial for the memory sticks. Any issues with Crucial?

I also found a Crucial 2TB MX500 2.5" Internal SSD for $280. It appears the difference is the above is SATA and has 3D NAND technology. Though I don't know if those things make the drive worth another $120.

I think you're looking in the wrong place. A 1TB Samsung 860 SATA drive is under $150 on Amazon. The solid state drives (ssd) are more expensive than hard disk drives (hdd) but they're soooo much faster. I gave you a pointer to one in an earlier post and Roy gave a link in his post.

They design those laptops to be serviced, and those that have multiple disk drives often have simple ways of getting to the drive slot. If you can do electrician work and woodwork, you can put a disk drive into a laptop. Go to Acer's website and see if you can find the hardware maintenance manual for your laptop. They give step-by-step instructions in those manuals for how to do things like installing a disk drive.

Mike

Here's some instructions for a computer which may be close to yours.

I also found some YouTube videos but I don't know if they address your specific model.

[Julie Moriarty]

The Samsung 850 is the pricey one. The 860 is more reasonable but neither may work in my laptop. So I ended up going with the Crucial, which I know works.

Thanks all for your help!

[Curt Harms]

The Samsung 850 is the pricey one. The 860 is more reasonable but neither may work in my laptop. So I ended up going with the Crucial, which I know works.

Thanks all for your help!

Crucial is part of Micron, a HUGE flash memory (and other solid state stuff) producer. You did well.

[Julie Moriarty]

Got the new drive installed the other day but didn't get the chance to boot up until today. The new drive wasn't recognized. Finally figured out how to get it recognized and started moving My Documents to the new 2TB drive. But they remained on the original drive (C, too. Before I go and manually delete them from C: drive, is there something I need to know?

[Leo Graywacz]

The easiest way to do what you wanted was to clone your drive. Macrium Reflect does a perfect job and it's got a free 30 day trial. So you can download it, clone the drive and be on your way. All you have to do is to swap boot drives in the BIOS and you should be good to go. You may still want to do that even though you have transferred your files already.

It'll make an exact copy of the drive so you won't have to learn where you moved stuff. However, if you wanted to do a fresh clean install of your OS then cloning isn't what you want to do.

I just swapped out for a new drive. My M2 SSD 256GB was at 10% remaining and the price of a M2 512GB was to hard to resist. Took 22 min 25 seconds to clone one to the other. But my OS was in good shape and there was no need to put in a fresh copy.

Unless you need that old drive for something, I'd just leave those files on it until you have a specific reason to delete them. Always nice to have a copy of those important files.

[Gary Ragatz]

Malcolm, as far as I can recall, RAIDs are almost on par to single hard drives when it comes to keeping data safe. My wife keeps her research data on multiple hard drives (full copies) in different locations. The Cloud (or someone else's computer ;-) is probably a much safer option for important data backups than RAID or multiple hard drives.

Depending on the nature of your wife's data, there may be institutional policy against using cloud storage. Many universities prohibit faculty from storing confidential research data on cloud services unless there is a special contract in place with the service provider that ensures I higher than standard level of protection for the data.

[Curt Harms]

I agree with Roy. Get a good ssd, such as Samsung or Crucial. Those cheap, off-brand ssds are reported to fail too quickly and when they do, you can lose a lot of data. Personally, I like the Samsung. A 1TB Samsung is less than $150.

Mike

I think that's a problem with SSDs in general. Spinny HDs usually give some indication they're about to fail, SSDs don't, they just quit.

[Julie Moriarty]

The easiest way to do what you wanted was to clone your drive.

Crucial provides very detailed instructions on how to clone a drive when swapping out but in my case I added a drive. The laptop came with a 250GB SSD that was quickly gobbled up. I bought a 2TB SSD and installed it in an empty bay. I've read about using the 250TGB drive and dedicate it to handle the OS but I can't find that article again or how to do that.

I thought I could move My Documents to the 2TB drive but all it did was copy the files. The fact it did that makes me think the My Documents folders are critical to Win 10 and shouldn't be deleted.

[Jim Becker]

Relocation of a resource like "My Documents" isn't going to be a simple move...I suspect something in the OS needs to be reconfigured to allow the change to the underlying default location. I'm no longer a Windows "guru" so I can't tell you what you need to do. But this theory also explains why you can copy, but not move that particular resource. You can certainly change the default save locations for applications to the new place, but that doesn't fix the default in Windows.

[Derek Meyer]

You can change the location of where the folders are located in Windows 10 by opening up File Explorer, right-clicking on the folder in the quick access list on the left and choosing Properties. Click the Location tab and specify the new location of the folder.

The most important (and likely largest) folders will be your Documents, Pictures, Videos, Downloads and Desktop. Create these folders on your new drive, copy the files there and then change the Location to point to them on the new drive. Then you can delete the files from the old drive.

[Lee DeRaud]

Relocation of a resource like "My Documents" isn't going to be a simple move...I suspect something in the OS needs to be reconfigured to allow the change to the underlying default location. I'm no longer a Windows "guru" so I can't tell you what you need to do. But this theory also explains why you can copy, but not move that particular resource. You can certainly change the default save locations for applications to the new place, but that doesn't fix the default in Windows.

Easier than I expected, actually: https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorial...-location.html
As Derek notes, it's even easier in Win10, probably because the "Homegroup" stuff went away.
FYI, I found that one by starting here: https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorial...ndows-7-a.html