Intel Solid-State Drives are a reliable alternative to traditional hard drives, offering breakthrough storage performance. Intel SSD provides your PC experience with to a new level of responsiveness -- including faster boot-up, application launch and file loading.
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- Before you begin any system upgrade, you'll want to back-up all critical data
- After you've saved your critical data power down your system making sure to unplugging and removing the battery if a notebook
- Now open your system chassis (notebook or desktop) and examine the current hard drive configuration to determine if it's a PATA or SATA connection. The cable connecting a PATA hard drive uses a ribbon cable with 40 wires. By comparison, a SATA cable only has 7 wires. If your notebook system is not already configured to support a SATA drive, you will not be able to upgrade to an Intel SSD. If you're upgrading a desktop system from PATA to SATA, you'll need to first secure the correct cables to upgrade your PATA system to SATA before progressing with this SSD upgrade
How to proceed
There are two primary ways to upgrade to a solid state drive. The easiest manner is with a hard drive upgrade kit or the more difficult being a fresh system OS install.
Hard Drive Upgrade Kit
The easiest approach would be to use a drive cloning kit. For example the Apricorn EZ Upgrade Kit (www.apricorn.com) had everything you need to upgrade your system to an Intel SSD. Using a cloning kit will streamline the process of having to reinstall all programs, OS, drivers and data files by automatically migrating your existing hard drive image to the new Intel SSD. Use of a hard drive upgrade kit has three primary steps:
- Put your Intel SSD into the external drive enclosure supplied with the upgrade kit.
- Clone your drive image using the upgrade kit's provided software.
- Swap out the system hard drive for your freshly cloned SSD.
Keep care of your old hard drive as it still maintains the original data and can now be used as a back-up.
WARNING this will erase any data on your current systems hard drive – this is not for novice users.
You need to ensure you have either purchased an operation system (OS) disk such as Window 7 or you have the system restore disk provided with the system at purchase. Before you go any further back-up all critical data. Once you've backed up your data and powered down your system, open the chassis and replace existing drive with the Intel SSD drive. Close the chassis and reboot your system. You'll need to boot from the OS (or system restore) disk. Once you've booted from the OS disk follow the onscreen instructions provided from the OS vendor. After the OS has been installed you'll now need to load the corresponding drivers for your system based upon the hardware configuration.
