How Do I Replace a Hard Drive?

One of two reasons you might need to replace your hard drive is that your computer has suffered a failure in hardware or that your primary hard drive needs to be upgraded for greater speed and capacity.

With a little assistance, replacing a hard drive can be done by anyone. This means that you can do it!

How do I replace a hard drive?

You will need to backup any data that you wish to save before you replace your hard drive. After you have uninstalled the old hard drive and installed the new one, you can restore the backup data.

These are the steps you need to follow:

1. The most important step is to back up all the data that you wish to keep. The valuable thing is not the hard drive. It’s the invaluable files that you have created over the years.Backup could be as simple as moving files to a flash drive or another storage device you are not using. Even better, consider using this opportunity to sign up for a cloud backup service if you don’t back it up often enough. This will ensure that you never lose a file.
2. It is simple to uninstall the hard drive. Turn off your computer and then disconnect the hard disk and physically remove it.Details will vary depending on your computer model, but generally, you need to remove data and power cables, or slide the hard drive from the storage bay it was installed into.
3. It’s as easy as reversing your uninstall steps to install the new hard drive. Place the new drive exactly where it was installed before reconnecting the power and data cables.
4. After your computer has turned on, format the hard disk so that it can store files. Once you are done backing up, you can copy your data to the new drive.

Things to Consider Before You Replace Your Hard Drive

It is a good idea to replace your hard drive if it’s failing, has failed or needs more space. For hard drives that simply run out of space, however, it might not be a good idea to upgrade to a newer model.

• Garbage is out!

You can often clean up hard drives with low storage space to make more room for what you wish to store on them. Use a free disk space analyzer to check if Windows is reporting low disk space. You can then delete or move any files that are not necessary.

• Add a drive

You can use an external hard drive to increase your computer’s capacity or to store large files that you don’t have on your primary drive.

You can also offload large files that you don’t use often to a cloud storage provider. One can use it as a second hard drive. However, the file is stored in the cloud so it is remote and thus safer.