A friend of mine was complaining about her slow laptop. She bought it when she was studying and said that over time, it just became slower and slower, until it was unusable. She was considering ditching it and then buying a new one until I said I would have a look at it.
She was quite frustrated because she had not the laptop that long and thought ‘what a waste’ that a laptop can become so ‘old’ so quickly.
So, I had a quick look at the specs – 4GB RAM, 1TB 5400rpm mechanical disk … I told her I would upgrade it for her.
This is really a cheap, simple upgrade, which will prolong the lifespan of the laptop for years and I’m going to show you how to do it using a Mac (If you are using Linux, then you probably don’t need these instructions).
You need a few things:
- Small screwdriver set
- An antistatic mat to work on
- A small tub to keep the laptop screws in one place
- 8GB (or 16GB) RAM module (Most likely DDR4, but you need to check what you need) – Amazon
- SSD Hard Drive (Get the same size as the disk you have) – Amazon
- 2 x SATA to USB cables – Amazon
Step 1 – Setup the anti-static mat and with your small screwdriver set, open your laptop up and check your RAM and Hard Drive and then order what you need above. For this upgrade, I needed 1 TB SSD disk and DDR4 3200MHz RAM
Step 2 – Remove the RAM and replace it with the RAM you purchased. This will immediately make a difference to the computer’s performance. But the real benefit is when you change the hard drive from a mechanical, spinning disk, to a Solid State disk
Step 3 – Remove the Hard Drive from the SATA interface. It should just slide out. There may be a couple of screws holding it in place, there may also be a frame/housing for the drive. If so, remove them and set them aside.
Step 4 – Using the SATA to USB cables, plug in the old drive and the new drive into the Mac. You may get a message about unreadable disk when you plug the new disk in … Click ignore.
** If you have USB ports on both sides of the laptop, plug one disk into one side and the other disk to the other side. This is a long process and using USB ports on the same bus will cause contention and half the speed it takes to copy the data.
You are now ready to copy the data from the old disk to the new disk! You are going to use the ‘dd’ command to do this, so you will need to use the Terminal application on the Mac.
‘dd’ is a data duplicator, it is a versatile utility used primarily for copying and converting data at a raw level.
Let’s start by looking at the attached disks using the diskutil command:
$ sudo diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk0
1: EFI EFI 314.6 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_APFS Container disk1 1.0 TB disk0s2
/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: APFS Container Scheme - +1.0 TB disk1
Physical Store disk0s2
1: APFS Volume Macintosh HD 23.5 GB disk1s1
2: APFS Snapshot com.apple.os.update-... 23.5 GB disk1s1s1
3: APFS Volume Macintosh HD - Data 591.3 GB disk1s2
4: APFS Volume Preboot 526.2 MB disk1s3
5: APFS Volume Recovery 1.1 GB disk1s4
6: APFS Volume VM 3.2 GB disk1s5
/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk2
1: EFI SYSTEM_DRV 272.6 MB disk2s1
2: Microsoft Reserved 16.8 MB disk2s2
3: Microsoft Basic Data Windows 474.6 GB disk2s3
(free space) 524.3 GB -
4: Windows Recovery 1.0 GB disk2s4
/dev/disk3 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: *1.0 TB disk3
The diskutil command shows the two EXTERNAL disks /dev/disk2 and /dev/disk3. The important thing to note is which is the old laptop disk and which is the new disk – You can see that /dev/disk2 has all the Windows / Microsoft partitions and the new disk /dev/disk3 is completely empty, so the old one is disk2 and new one is disk3.
You are going to copy everything from /dev/disk2 to /dev/disk3 – IMPORTANT : doing it the other way will wipe all the data from the old disk! Ensure you follow the next step correctly.
Using the dd command, copy the data from /dev/disk2 (Old Disk) to /dev/disk3 (New Disk) using the following command:
$ sudo dd if=/dev/disk2 of=/dev/disk3 bs=4M status=progressThis command will copy every bit of data from disk2 to disk3 … Make sure you get this the correct way around or you will lose your data!
Be advised that this command takes a LONG time. For a 1TB disk, this takes about 25 hours!! Keep checking the progress.
Once it finishes, check that the 2 disks look identical :
$ sudo diskutil list
Password:
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk0
1: EFI EFI 314.6 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_APFS Container disk1 1.0 TB disk0s2
/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: APFS Container Scheme - +1.0 TB disk1
Physical Store disk0s2
1: APFS Volume Macintosh HD 23.5 GB disk1s1
2: APFS Snapshot com.apple.os.update-... 23.5 GB disk1s1s1
3: APFS Volume Macintosh HD - Data 601.2 GB disk1s2
4: APFS Volume Preboot 526.2 MB disk1s3
5: APFS Volume Recovery 1.1 GB disk1s4
6: APFS Volume VM 3.2 GB disk1s5
/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk2
1: EFI SYSTEM_DRV 272.6 MB disk2s1
2: Microsoft Reserved 16.8 MB disk2s2
3: Microsoft Basic Data Windows 474.6 GB disk2s3
(free space) 524.3 GB -
4: Windows Recovery 1.0 GB disk2s4
/dev/disk3 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk3
1: EFI SYSTEM_DRV 272.6 MB disk3s1
2: Microsoft Reserved 16.8 MB disk3s2
3: Microsoft Basic Data Windows 474.6 GB disk3s3
(free space) 524.3 GB -
4: Windows Recovery 1.0 GB disk3s4Step 5 – Put the new drive back into the laptop.
Once the copy is complete and you can see the above that both disks look the same, put the new disk into the laptop and power the laptop on. You should now notice a significant speed increase!
If you found this information helpful, feel free to buy me a coffee by clicking the link below. Thanks!
Virtual-Shift 