Can I upgrade the SSD drive in my laptop to one with more GB? If so up to how many GB's

[Hugh_Lett]

I have a HP Pavilion Gaming Laptop, model number 15-ec0013dx, The hard drive is pretty small, It's a 256 GB PCIe® NVMe™ M.2 SSD. Can I upgrade the drive in my laptop to one with more GB? If so up to how many GB's. Would like to get at least a 500GB SSD, or if it can take a 1TB SSD that would be ideal. I just don't know if this model can handle a 1 TB or 512 GB SSD.

I know it needs to be a NVMe M.2 SSD solid state drive, since there's no place in the laptop to put a HDD drive, only a port for the SSD stated.

So is  my laptop compatible with a 500 GB or 1TB SSD? provided I make sure it's a NVMe M.2 SSD?

There's a PC repair shop where the guy has a cloner for that type of drive and can clone the current 256 GB drive onto a higher capacity drive provided it is supported according to the manufacturer. He said the cloning process is done on a cloning machine source drive port and a "clone to" port type. It will cost $200 forthe 500GB drive and the cloning That way I shouldn't need to reinstall my OS or my all my apps and files.

OR my prefered solution: I could just buy a cloner for about $120 with shipping on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=NVMe+M.2+SSD+cloner&i=electronics&crid=1UPJ1HBTKBXGD&sprefix=nvme+m.2+ssd...) and a 500GB  NVMe M.2 Internal Gaming SSD for $67 and do it myself and then clone it onto another 500GB SSD every so often to have an exact backup of my Laptop so when (not if) the SSD drive evers fails, I can just swap the clone into the computer and it should start working again without any reconfiguring the OS or anything.

SO all I really need to know is this: Can my model of laptop handle a larger drive and if so up to how many GB or TB. I assume a larger SSD is going to produce more heat. I know how to apply the heat transfer paste and all that when swapping out parts, if they have old heat transfer material on them.

Anyone know about this. I remember in the ad for my laptop it said the SSD was upgradable to (x?) GB. I just don't remember what the x was.

Thanks in advance. Ian

[Paul_Tikkanen]

HP offered NVMe SSD's up to 1 TB in the model series as indicated in chapter 1 of the service manual.

c06446633.pdf (hp.com)

You can go higher than that if you want.  Theoretically the sky's the limit as long as the drive is single-sided.

The Crucial SSD report for your notebook indicates that they sell NVMe SSD's up to 4 TB:

HP - Compaq Pavilion 15-ec0013dx | Memory RAM & SSD Upgrades | Crucial.com

According to the service teardown video, the M.2 SSD is in an enclosure with a thermal pad, so you should just have to remove and replace the drive with a larger capacity drive.

Replace the M.2 Solid State Drive | HP Pavilion 15z-ec000 CTO | HP (youtube.com)

Chapter 5, page 30 of the service manual shows the enclosure that covers the drive.

Drives and Cloning...if you want a 1 TB drive, I recommend the Samsung 980 PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD.

Amazon.com: SAMSUNG 980 SSD 1TB PCle 3.0x4, NVMe M.2 2280, Internal Solid State Drive, Storage for P...

You will also need a USB3/USB-C enclosure to fit the new drive into so you can clone the drive as your notebook only has one M.2 slot.

Something like this:

Amazon.com: SSK Aluminum M.2 NVME SATA SSD Enclosure Adapter, USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) to NVME PCI-E ...

Samsung has free software called the Samsung magician which has cloning software.

Samsung Magician Software | Samsung US

Make sure you set up the software to clone the smaller capacity drive to a larger one or you will have 750 GB of dead space.

After the clone is successful, you can install the new SSD in place of the 256 GB drive.