How to upgrade your notebook to a SATA 2.5" SSD

erico · ‎11-16-2015

@suzopedia wrote:
We bought an Envy 14t-j100. Can we swap out 1T HDD for 512G SSD. I read through the online manuals and all replacement drives listed are HDD. Looks like 2.5" bay. How do I find list of acceptable SSD replacements. I had heard that HP used non-standard connectors. Is that true?

Yes. You can swap it out for a 500GB SSD. SATA connectors in HP notebooks are SATA specification and thus standard. If any adapter is used inside a notebook, it can be used with the replacement hard disk or SSD. Yours uses a hard drive cable between the hard disk and the systemboard. See the Maintenence & Service guide on page 30.

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suzopedia · ‎11-16-2015

OK thanks for the info, enrico. I guess I'll take a wack at this. I have replaced parts in a desktop but not in a laptop. My husband will help.

We have decided to keep the current one as is and order a new one for me and replace the HDD. HP if you are listening I would much rather you make a 14 inch Envy with solid state drive. Less work for me!

erico · ‎11-16-2015

@suzopedia wrote:
OK thanks for the info, enrico. I guess I'll take a wack at this. I have replaced parts in a desktop but not in a laptop. My husband will help.

We have decided to keep the current one as is and order a new one for me and replace the HDD. HP if you are listening I would much rather you make a 14 inch Envy with solid state drive. Less work for me!

There are 14 and 15 inch Envy notebooks with SSD disks.

The HP Omen 15, which is my current HP product loan was delivered with a 256GB PCIE SSD.

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dlleno · ‎11-16-2015

Hi again, long time no post; I've read through all 15 pages of this thread again to come back up to speed, and have a few of points to highlight and a question to re-ask:

1. For sake of language precision, there appears to be a difference between migration and cloning. Samsung's Magician software, mentioned in the opening post, is neither. Samsung tells me that Magician is a an SSD managment toolset and does not perform migration work. Their migration tool is apparently called something else, although both Magician and migration tools are included in the Samsung SSD purchase. (on edit: the importance of this distinction is left "as an excercise to the reader", lol).

2. Samsung tells me that their migration utility produces a bootable copy of the C:\ OS drive, but it does not make any attempt to migrate the HP tools and recovery partitions. Samsung tells me that these areas are protected and they have opted, as a corporation, not to attempt cloning, as others do.

3. It appears that the price difference among consumer grade 1TB SSDs is getting smaller. Mushkin's MKNSSDRE1TB appears on Amazon for $324 and Samsung's 850 EVO 1TB is a paltry $23 more.

4. I'm planing to upgrade my 160GB SSD to a 1TB Samsung. I'm coming to the conclusion that I should not depend on a cloning tool's ability to re-create the recovery partition and HP Tools partition. While some (such as Ancronis EZ Gig) may attempt to do it, Acronis tells me that success cannot be guarenteed -- in particular, Acronis tells me that the combination of Intel SSD and HP laptops represents one of the more secure mechnisms for protecting these partitions. This tells me that once I clone my OS to an after market drive, I should probably not plan on using the recovery partitions that Acronis may have attempted to clone. Instead I should plan on recovering using some external media, such as the recovery DVD set I made a few years ago (or can buy again from HP). This also tells me that (for Samsung SSDs anyway) there is no reason (other than perhaps to buy the cable) to purchase Acronis software, as the the Samsung utility will work just fine for the migration itself.

On the above note -- has anyone upgraded from intel SSD to aftermarket SSD been succesful at migrating the recovery and tools partitions? And if you say yes have you used them? This brings me to the final quesiton:

5. Lets suppose that I succesfully transition my OS to a new SSD (without the recovery partition), and the OS drive bricks. what are the options to restore the OS onto another (replacement) SSD? Do I have these correct?

a) (on edit: removing this option as now I see it is silly)

b) use optical recovery disks to start over from the factory image. that seems the simplest, if one is committed to going all the way back to the factory image...

c) create a bootable recovery drive with the the SSDs migration software before catastrophy strikes, and restore from that. (on edit: looks like the best option is to create a bootable drive on a USB stick with software such as O&O DiskImage).

suzopedia · ‎11-16-2015

I should have been more exact in my description. The Envy 14t does not seem to be available with ssd. The exact model we bought is 14t-j100 I believe. I have looked and looked. I do want 6th gen i7. I don't want a number pad. I have looked at Omen but $2000 for config I want. I know it is only 4th gen but still fast. The Envy 14t-j100 is my perfect computer if it came with ssd. So I should start doing my homework. I got a lot of reading to do. 🙂 Now if I'm wrong and there is a model with ssd please let me know!

CloudscrapeR · ‎11-25-2015

Hello,

will I lose my warranty if I replace the original hard disk drive with a SSD on a brand new notebook?

erico · ‎11-25-2015

No.

Keep the original hard drive in its current state. You will need to reinstall it if you need to return the notebook to a Service Center for warranty service.

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CloudscrapeR · ‎11-26-2015

It's not like I don't trust you, but I've been having mixed responses on the subject.

The notebook is a 15-AC089NL and I live in Italy.

Does that change anything? 😉

erico · ‎11-26-2015

According to another HP Expert member @Huffer , HP will not have a problem with your upgrading to an SSD.

The only thing is as I have said, that you must make sure that you don't damage the notebook during the install or removal procedure.

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JunYip · ‎12-02-2015

Hi guys, just got off the phone with Hp support and didn't get any help at all. Thought I might try this place instead.

Just got myself a 15 AB 108TX, with a 2TB hdd. My question is if I'm looking to replace the HDD with a 1gb Ssd, could I port the 2tb into the optical drive ? Also, could I install a m2 and load os from the m2?

Thank you for your time.
Jun

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