Choose the Right Replacement Drive
Do a web search for your current drive manufacturer and model to get the scale, thickness, and interface to find out the details of what kind of drive you can purchase (e.g., 2.5-inch, 12.5mm thick SATA drive). Many laptops use 2.5-inch drives, but make sure you review yours; you can find the details on the label of the drive itself.
Move Your Data, OS, and Applications to the New Drive
If you have an external hard drive or a network-attached storage (NAS) unit lying around, you do not need to buy anything other than a new hard drive. You can save an image of your current drive to your existing external drive by using applications such as Acronis True Image or Clonezilla Free.
Alternatively, you can copy only My Documents and other data files to the external drive if you want to start fresh with your laptop operating system and migrate only your data (documents, images, videos, etc.), switch out the old drive with the new one and install new Windows and your other software on the new drive in your laptop. Finally, copy the data/folders that you saved back to your new drive to your hard drive. This method can be made much easier by Windows’ built-in Quick Transfer tool: Copying Directly from the Old Drive to the New Drive As you can see, the above process requires the additional step of copying your drive to an external (intermediate) drive, then back to the new drive. You can easily connect the new and old drives together using either a simple USB-to-SATA/IDE adapter or cable, a laptop hard drive enclosure (which holds the old hard drive and connects it to your laptop via USB), or a laptop hard drive upgrade kit if you don’t want to use an intermediary external hard disk or NAS to copy the data back and forth. There are two options available: cloning the old drive, and copying only the data. CLONING THE OLD DRIVE
