Hard drive replacement

[Teabobaggins]

Hard drive replacement for HP Pavilion Gaming Laptop? Any recommendations?

[PeteC22]

It appears yours came with a 1TB 7200 rpm hard drive, yes? The best performance replacement drive to use would be to go to a NVMe drive, however, in my opinion, the more user-friendly route (and still far better performance than the hard drive it came with) would be to purchase a 1 TB 2.5" SSD drive.  Go to Amazon and purchase a 1 TB 2.5" SSD, I recommend the Samsung 870, San Disk Ultra, WD Blue, or Crucial drives, any of these are safe choices. (The Samsung 870 IMHO is the best, but also just a bit pricier).  NVMe drives are faster still, but frankly, you'd be hard pressed to actually sense much of a difference, while the upgrade to any SSD drive will seem incredible versus the original hard drive.

Now, you can opt to install a NVMe drive instead - the advantage being it is even faster (and you can retain the original hard drive as additional storage).  Recommended drives?  I recommend staying to drives known to run reasonably cool for laptop usage.  The Hynix Gold P31 is maybe at the top of my list for performance combined with cool running.  Also the Samsung SSD 980 or WD Blue 570 are fine choices.  (Don't go for a Gen 4 NVMe, your PCIE slot won't allow it to perform better than a Gen 3 NVMe drive anyway)