17-by0062st Upgrading Hard Drive To SSD

[Zendall]

I'd like to upgrade the hard drive in my 17-by0062st to a SSD but can't find any information on how to go about it.  Can anyone help?  Thank you in advance for any replies.  

[Huffer]

Here is the Service manual:

Manual

Start on p. 35 to remove the back cover. 

M.2 red circle HDD green square

You say you want to upgrade TO an SSD. You could remove the hard drive and replace it with a 2.5 inch SATA-3 SSD like the Samsung Evo 860. However, you have a separate SSD (M.2 2280 form factor) slot so you can have the original 1 TB 5400 rpm hard drive for storage and then a very fast "gumstick" M.2 disk to use for running Windows. 

The slot in the red circle above can take an Optane module which is a smaller capacity PCIe/NVME disk that "helps" the main hard drive run faster. It will pep it up to run as fast or faster than an SSD at a reasonable cost. I recently bought a 16 gig Optane module for an HP laptop to add to the hard drive and benchmarks showed speeds as fast as a SATA SSD. 

Cost was about $30. 

OR, you can put a full capacity M.2 disk in the slot circled in red. It can be either a SATA-3 kind or a PCIe/NVME (fastest storage on the market now). A SATA SSD is about 4 times faster than a hard drive and an NVME M.2 disk is about 4 times as fast as a SATA SSD to help you make your decision. Your model laptop with the 8th gen Intel Core i5 will be able to handle the newest fastest NVME M.2 models like the Samsung 970 Evo like this:

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-250GB-PCI-Express-Solid-V-NAND/dp/B07D79KSX5/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1...

You are not limited to 256 gigs in capacity but with a 1 TB hard drive you could get by with a smaller SSD for the system (Windows). 

We can discuss software cloning/migration and everything else you need to know if you wish or just please accept as solution if this is the info you needed. 

[Zendall]

Thank you so much for the manual & additional information!  For me, storage isn't a big factor.  My last laptop only had 120 gig SSD and it was fine.  Right now I can get a 250 gig Evo 860 for about $60 which is within my budget or I might go for 500 gig.  It's nice to know the stick drive is an option for the future.  I had no idea my laptop can use one.  

I would love to get your input on cloning.  I don't have any experience with it and am feeling a bit intimidated.  

[will35]

Does anybody know how many PCIe lanes this model's M.2 slot has?