Want to use new SS Hard drive instead of my Serial ATA-300

[Buz1]

Looking to swop my SATA Serial ATA-300 500Gb for a new Solid State HD. Please can anyone tell me if this is possible and how do I find speed if existing HD? Is it worth exchanging to SSD? Thanks

[WAWood]

@Buz1

Any current SSD (as long as it is not an M.2) will fit into the space occupied currently by the HDD.

To swap an SSD for the HDD, you would need to do the following:

1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR)
2) Connect the new drive to the PC using a USB-to-Hard-Drive drive adapter (like the one illustrated below)
3) Follow the instructions in this link: http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW/Cloning+a+disk
4) Shutdown the PC when done
5) Swap the drives and reboot the PC.
 
NOTE: To do this easily, the SDD has to be the same capacity as the HDD.  IF you get an SDD that is a lot smaller, then before you do the cloning, you have to shrink the largest partition on the HDD (usually the OS partition), to the size such that it, and the other partitions, fit easily on the SSD.


You should boot from the new drive without any problems.
 
Typical USB-to-Hard-Drive adapter:


 
Good Luck

[Buz1]

WAWood cheers for the reply. I think I have usb to SATA adapter which will help. Do you think if my existing HDD is a serial ATA 300 which 500GB I would definitely have an increase in performance etc fitting SDD? I read somewhere that swooping HDD got SDD May not always improve the performance I.e speed to read data etc?

[WAWood]

@Buz1

Most modern SSDs are 6Gb/s not 3Gb/s -- so the speed will definitely be less in an older PC.

But, I have a tablet PC from 2005, it's SATA 150, not even 300, and it's using an SSD -- and the real-time performance is much better than the old SATA HDD drive that was in there.

How much performance improvement you will see, I can not estimate.

[Buz1]

Hi WAWood. Yep thought about the question and not easy to answer. I am going to upgrade my RAM 1st. I have 4 Gb and am going to increase to 8. Then consider dropping out the 500 Gb Hdd for 500 SSD. Cheers for your help again.