How to upgrade your Gaming Laptop’s Storage
If you’ve got a gaming laptop with limited storage space, you might want to think about an upgrade. In this video I want to walk you through the process from working out what you can use, to actually installing it, setting it up in Windows, plus how to replace your OS drive and copy over old files. Lets jump right in!
First things first, you need to know what drive you can use. Some laptops, like this Acer Helios 300, have a spare M.2 slot inside meaning you can buy a new drive, drop it in and that’s it sorted. Some, especially ones from a couple years ago, might have come with a single SSD, normally in the 120-500GB range, and a 1-2TB HDD. That latter configuration is less likely to have an empty slot to fill meaning you will need to replace something rather than just add.
To find out what your machine has, the most obvious way is to take a look inside. We will need to get inside to install the new drive anyway so this is a good way to familiarise yourself with how to do it. If you’d rather not, you can also search for the model of your machine and the word “teardown” and chances are someone has taken it apart on camera.
Since it’s 2021 and all, I’d pretty much only recommend adding solid state drives to your machine. So, with that in mind, here are your three main options. First is your option to replace the 2.5” HDD, a 2.5” SSD. These are getting crazy cheap for the capacity, I’ll leave some linked in the description if you want to pick one up. Then you’ve got the M.2 options, either a SATA drive which often has the B+M key with three sections, and NVME drives which generally use the M key with two fingers. To know which you’ll need, some manufacturers do list that on their website – Acer lists “solid state interface” as “PCI Express”, aka NVME.
Ok, so you know what drive you need and you have it in hand, what now? Well, you’ll need to get the machine open. Turn it off fully and unplug the power and anything else connected, flip it over then start removing all the screws you can see. It will vary what laptop you have as to where the screws are, how many there are and if and if any are a little more hidden or under those terrible “warranty void if removed” stickers, but in general they should be easy enough to find. I like to put them in the lid of my iFixit kit in the order I took them out, as they can often be different sizes and you don’t want to accidentally put the extra long ones in the short holes and push straight through the keyboard plate.
Once all the screws are out you’ll need to remove the bottom cover. The plectrum tools in the iFixit kit (or if you play guitar) are useful for peeling up the edge and popping the clips without breaking them. Take it slowly freeing one clip at a time – don’t just wrench on it as you will snap them. The rear of the laptop is often clipped in a little differently and can benefit from lifting the whole piece from the front edge and wiggling to get it free. Once it’s off you’ll now have the laptop ready.
Assuming you are adding a drive, find the spare M.2 slot, remove the little screw, slide the drive in, in this case I’m using this 2TB Kioxia XG6-P, push it flush with the board and reinstall the screw, and that’s it. If you are adding or replacing a 2.5” drive, you’ll need to remove the carrier holding the drive in, in this case that’s 4 philips head screws, then either remove the drive from it’s bracket or get to installing your new one. In this Acer Helios 300 if it didn’t have a hard drive installed from the factory they include the SATA power and data cable in the box so you’ll need to clip that in, plug in the drive, then reinstall the bracket with those 4 screws.
You can then put the bottom cover back on, press all the clips back down then reinstall all the screws where they came from. Fire up the laptop and open This PC in Explorer. If your new drive isn’t there, don’t worry, it’s not broken! Click on “Manage” in the top bar, then “Disk Management” in the left pane. It should pop up with a window asking you to initialise the drive, click next through it, then find it in the lower center section, it’ll have a black bar across the width of it. Right click and click create simple volume, again keep pressing next, give it a name if you want, then that’s it up and running!
If you are planning on upgrading your boot drive, you’ll want to do a couple of things before you swap it out. If you’ve got a full Windows 10 license key you will need to have that available, you might want to copy any important files you want to carry over to your second drive if you have one, or we can do that later with an external caddy. You will then want to open command prompt as administrator and type slmgr.vbs /upk to uninstall your Windows key making it available to switch to your new drive. You will also want to run the media creation tool you can get from Microsoft’s website and create a bootable USB stick so you can install Windows on your new drive. You can then follow the earlier steps to install your new drive.
Once the drive is in, plug your bootable USB stick in and power on the machine, pressing normally either F2 or F12 to access the boot menu, or delete to enter the BIOS so you can select your USB stick as your first boot priority option. It should then boot the installer, click through it, press “new” to initialise your new drive and create the necessary partitions, then let it install as normal. Don’t forget to install your product key to activate Windows.
If you weren’t able to copy your files from your old drive, don’t worry! You can use a caddy like this to connect the drive as a USB device and copy your files over nice and easy.
So, that’s the process of getting up and running with a storage upgrade.
