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| Is It Worth Replacing A Laptop Hard Drive? |
A worthwhile laptop hard drive upgrade depends on the type of hard drive currently in the laptop, the replacement hard drives available, and the total replacement cost. However, if your laptop hard drive is defective, it is worth replacing over buying a new laptop. Hard drive replacements are standard, with equipment costs between $60 and $100 on the low end. The total replacement cost is a $300 job.
| Solid State Replacement Drives | ||
|---|---|---|
| Model | Description | Price |
| WD Blue SN550 (250GB) | Low cost and consistent. Reads/Writes: 2.400 MBps / 950 Mbps | $55 |
| Silicon Power P34A80 (1TB) | Great value over other drives in this class. Reads/Writes: 3,400 MBps / 3,000 Mbps | $118 |
| Adata XPG SX8200 Pro (1TB) | Best overall and it will not break the bank. Reads/Writes: 3,500 MBps / 3,000 Mbps | $120 |
| Samsung 970 EVO Plus (512GB) | Very stong write performance. Reads/Writes: 3,500 MBps / 3,200 Mbps | $167 |
| Samsung 970 PRO (1TB) | Possibly the best performing in the 1TB class. Reads/Writes: 3,500 MBps / 2,700 Mbps | $170 |
| Team Group T-Force Cardea Zero Z340 | Class leading endurance rating. Reads/Writes: 3,400 MBps / 3,000 Mbps | $192 |
| Patriot Viper VPR100 | Integrated heat shield. Reads/Writes: 3,300 MBps / 2,900 Mbps | $355 |
| Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0 (2TB) | Class leading endurance ratings, solid performer. Reads/Writes: 5,000 MBps / 4,400 MBps | $400 |
| Sabrent Rocket Q (8TB) | Higest capacity M.2 SSD available. Reads/Writes: 3,300 MBps / 2,900 Mbps | $1500 |
| *Prices subject to change and are current as of this posting | ||
Performance gains makes it worthwhile to replace the hard drive
In my opinion and I am sure there are lots of people out there that will agree with me, the single most effective way to upgrade the performance of your laptop is to replace the hard drive. And if your laptop is currently using an old mechanical hard drive you will see a dramatic increase in performance that makes the replacement all worthwhile. Your older laptop will boot up much quicker. In most cases under 10 seconds or even faster. The entire laptop will feel snappy and quick to respond. You will also see a big decrease in loading programs, opening and saving large files. If you use your laptop to play games you will also see a clear benefit. you get all these benefits making the replacement beneficial. After all you are only talking about equipment costs in the range of $60 to $100, right? And plus even if you took the laptop to a computer repai shop the total cost is only a $300 job making it all the more advantageous.
As newer technology comes out older technology becomes cheaper. And is the case with hard drives. So an old mechanical hard drive will cost much less and it will have more capacity at a lower cost than newer hard drives. So, all this to say is if you have tons of data on your hard drive it may cost more to get that same capacity using an SSD or newer technology. To give you a real life example, I had tons of web site data stored on my old computer. To be exact it was almost 2TB of data. Yea, I know, who stores that much? But at the time I was running multiple websites. Anyway, when the first SSDs came out I was not able to rush out an purchase a 2TD SSD. First of all, they did not even make a 2TB SSD and if they did the cost would have been way more than what I was willing to pay. So what I did was to wait and then I eventually purchased 2ea Western Digital 1 TB Blue SSDs. The price was great and performance was very good as well. I have been running these now for several years and they have been flawless!!!
Western Digital 1 TB Blue 3D NAND Internal PC SSD SATA III 6 Gb - $104.99
Laptop hard drive replacement options
Making you laptop even more valuable you can install even faster and better SSDs. But in my case, this was all the performance I needed and the price was right making it beneficial for me. Western Digital and other manufactures make NVMe SSDs which are superior in every way and at some point I will make a switch. The current Western Digital Blue data transfer rate is 560 MB per second and the newer M.2 NVMe is up to 2,400 MB per second. There is a big difference in speed between the SATA SSD and the newer M.2 NVMe SSD. There are a lot of other brands out there that are really good too. Western Digital is not the only one. But it’s one as of this writing that I would recommend based on my experience.
Another reason why I choose a SATA SSD over an M.2 SSD is it was very easy to simply unplug my mechanical hard drive and plug in the new SSD making it usable very quickly. Since it was a SATA connection it was straight forward.
Is it worth replacing a laptop hard drive conclusion
So the bottom line is if you paid a lot of money for your laptop then you most likely got a good processor and other components. Now the next question is how old is your laptop. And if your laptop is less than 6 years old then Moore’s Law has not really caught up with it yet and you should replace your hard drive.
Just remember its advantageous to do the replacement when the equipment costs are less than $100.
If you paid less than $600 for your laptop then it’s a no brainier. Do not replace your laptop hard drive because by the time you are done you will have spent almost as much as if you bought a new one. So just buy new laptop. Now, here is the interesting situation, if you paid more than $600 but less than $800 and the laptop is less than 2 years old the replace. Here the thinking, to replace your hard drive because you can extend the life of the laptop by a year or so. The cost will be just less than purchasing a new laptop. You will have to run the numbers because this is a gray area.
And lastly if you paid more than $600 but less than $800 and the laptop is over 2 years old then do not replace the hard drive. In a year or less a newer model laptop will double the speed of your current laptop so it’s not worth it.
And of course there are some exceptions to everything mentioned. The one big exceptions is if you are also down grading your laptop to a new less role like just surfing the internet or something much less than what it once did. In this case you can really get by with a lower end laptop, one with much less computing power so it makes good value to replace the hard drive. Please leave a comment below. I would love to hear your situation and what you actually ended up deciding. I hope this article was of value to you and you were able to make a decision on whether or not to replace your laptop hard drive.
If you liked this article, then you should read my other article on this site called “Is it cheaper to replace a hard drive or buy a new computer?” You might be surprised at the answer to the question.
References
Image by Photo Mix from Pixabay
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