Upgrade Laptop Drive to SSD

I have a Toshiba hard drive model MQ04ABF100 SATA 2.5" 5400 RPM drive that I want to upgrade to an SSD in a Lenovo Ideapad 3 Laptop.
 
Can I just get a new SATA 3 SSD drive and have it be compatible with the existing hard drive's connector?
 
Thanks,
 
BSR

Yes....easy peasey.
 
Just purchase a SSD/SATA to USB cable. 
 

1 - USB 3.0 to SATA III Adapter Cable with UASP SATA to USB Converter for 2.5" Hard Drives Disk HDD and Solid State Drives SSD on Amazon for $8.99
 
2 - Connect your new drive to the USB cable. 
 
3 - Download free Mini Tools partition wizard free and copy the running partition to the SSD drive. 
 
hxxps://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html
 
 
4 - It will reboot and do a bit copy from old SATA drive to new SATA SSD drive. 
 
5 - Remove old drive and replace it with new SATA (SSD) drive and you should be good to go.
 
It'll be much faster running.  I have done this with my Lenova Thinkpads.

I replaced my HDD in my Toshiba Netbook with a SSD using the same Sata i/f and size, in a simple plug in. I found a program that was made to copy the HDD over to the SSD verbatim, at low level sectoring etc. and then just swapped them. Piece of cake.
 
However, the SSD was no faster access than the HDD, no matter what they tell you. Tech may have have changed in the last 5 years though so YMMV. The drivers are likely tuned to use a HDD timing etc. also.

What brand of SSD do you guys like best?

BraveSirRobbin said:

What brand of SSD do you guys like best?

Click to expand...

My preference is for San Disk, Samsung, and Western Digital. They've all been reliable for me.

Here is a video that shows the take apart of a Lenovo Ideapad 3. 
 
While you have the back cover off you can install an M.2 2280 SSD SATA drive or a 2.5" SATA SSD drive.  Both are easy peasey installs.
 
[youtube]http://youtu.be/JyrJDGWf3JM[/youtube]

BraveSirRobbin said:

What brand of SSD do you guys like best?

Click to expand...

They have all had problems upon first releases and got bad names over the years.
I agree with RAL above, for more established brand names. However I have never heard of San Disk SSDs, only mem cards. Look at speed specs for access times and latency etc..
Again, anything today is far better than two years ago in the speed game.

LarrylLix said:

They have all had problems upon first releases and got bad names over the years.
I agree with RAL above, for more established brand names. However I have never heard of San Disk SSDs, only mem cards. Look at speed specs for access times and latency etc..
Again, anything today is far better than two years ago in the speed game.

Click to expand...

San Disk SSDs are sold here.  Maybe not up in Canada?
 
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072R78B6Q

thanks...now i just have to figure out how to restore the UEFI partition as this hard drive crashed and no image backup (tried restore process already and no go).
 
I believe I have to partition the disk and somehow assign a small partition as the UEFI???  I need to do some more reading on this as I don't have any experience with replacing a hard drive with UEFI before (replaced many a pc component before though).

Guessing then the current drive is not booting eh?
 
Might be easier then first to create a boot / repair USB stick first to repair the boot partition on the drive.
 
There are many out there in Internetlandia.
 
First one to try is a Windows 10 boot up OS stick which will see the EFI boot partition and ask if you want to fix it.

You can write one with Rufus on another computer with Windows 10.

pete_c said:

Guessing then the current drive is not booting eh?
 
Might be easier then first to create a boot / repair USB stick first to repair the boot partition on the drive.
 
There are many out there in Internetlandia.
 
First one to try is a Windows 10 boot up OS stick which will see the EFI boot partition and ask if you want to fix it.

You can write one with Rufus on another computer with Windows 10.

Click to expand...

Thanks as always for the reply and help Pete.
 
This hard drive is toast (showing 0MB available when I try to do a new install of windows when selecting the drives) and I want to replace it anyway with a newer SSD as I described above.  My understanding is I need to create a UEFI partition and can do this with creating a UEFI boot USB, but the steps are a little lacking in my reading.
 
I'm going to follow these instructions which I believe should at least get me started.

It sounds like the old drive has abended. 
 
You could try to repair it later on with a repair utility connecting the drive to a USB-SATA cable maybe or send it out for data recovery (a tad expensive still today).
 
The linked instructions will work fine for a new installation.
 
From doing this a few times here .....
 
What is nice is that when you install it and log on to your Microsoft account it will most likely match the desktop to what you already have registered in the cloud.
 
By default any other Windows boxes you have on line will have already backed up their stuff to the Microsoft cloud...automagically unless you have the feature turned off.
 
That and if the Microsoft license is readable from the bios it will just utilize that license for registeration.

You should check the power requirements of the old drive against the new SSD. I installed a samsung in in a NUC PC and I liked it so much that I bought one for an old HP laptop. When I installed in the laptop it would just power off mid-boot.  It turns out the the SSD used a lot more power than the original drive and I blamed that for the problem.
 
Mike.

mikefamig said:

You should check the power requirements of the old drive against the new SSD. I installed a samsung in in a NUC PC and I liked it so much that I bought one for an old HP laptop. When I installed in the laptop it would just power off mid-boot.  It turns out the the SSD used a lot more power than the original drive and I blamed that for the problem.
 
Mike.

Click to expand...

oh wow...good point!  You would think it would be the opposite as a mechanical feature would draw more current than just memory chips/circuit board.

BraveSirRobbin said:

oh wow...good point!  You would think it would be the opposite as a mechanical feature would draw more current than just memory chips/circuit board.

Click to expand...

IIRC the mechanical drives need more power from the 12v supply for the motor, and head stepping motor, with the 5v logic using less. In a SSD there is no 12v requirements and it is all on the 5v electronics. Probably less power required but more 5v.....It's a gottcha!