The replacement Hard Drive for ASUS Laptop, what are the benefits?

HDDs and SSDs are both the most popular disk type on the market, both of them have its own obvious advantages and that’s what we are more concerned about. In sum, at the same price, HDDs have bigger capacity while SSDs have higher performance (eg: faster writing and reading speed).

To gain better performance, it’s a wise choice to replace ASUS laptop hard drive with SSD. It makes you feel your computer is like a brand-new computer, boot faster, run multiple programs smoothly, etc. This can’t be done by cleaning up useless files, deleting large files, unintalling programs no longer used, defragmenting hard disk, etc.

Also, SSDs own a greater security than HDDs. Because SSDs does not have any removable parts internally. To reduce the possibility of losing data to the most extent, it’s a wise choice to replace laptop HDD with SSD.

But if your original hard drive works well, the best practice is to use SSD for OS and HDD for storage, which makes full use of advantages of HDDs and SSDs. 

Of course, if you think SSDs are too expensive or just for home use, there is no problem with using a larger disk as replacement. It can makes your computer faster but limited.

Replace hard drive with SSD on ASUS laptop: Backup & Restore or Clone

In fact, the replacement hard drive for ASUS laptop is a reasonably simple task, whether for ASUS X555L hard drive replacement or for ASUS Q302LA/ASUS Q504U. You just need to open the back cover and replace the old hard drive with your new SSD. However, how about all the data stored on the old hard drive? Just leave them behind?

Well, if you don’t care about the old files, even you need to install all of your programs one by one and all of personal data will go forever, you still can reinstall Windows 10/8/7 so that your laptop/desktop can start normally.  It’s a time-consuming and problematic job.

If you need to keep all your programs and data, it’s suggested to backup disk or system and then restore disk or system image to new hard drive or SSD. For easier way, you can clone laptop/desktop HDD to SSD directly, with system files, installed applications, and all of your data files. To make it, you need an all-in-one software integrated with backup & restore or clone function, here is AOMEI Backupper Standard. 

How do I easily replace ASUS laptop hard drive with SSD?

As mentioned earlier, you have two working ways to perform ASUS laptop hard drive upgrade, namely upgrade ASUS laptop with backup and restore solution, clone laptop HDD to SSD. Then, which method should you use?

>>  If your laptop only has one slot, you could first backup your disk to an external hard drive, then swap hard drive and SSD and restore the image externally to new SSD. Or you can also choose to backup and restore system image from external hard drive. 

>> If your laptop has two slots or it’s a desktop, you coulddirectly clone the entire hard drive with different sector size, even smaller SSD, or migrate only operating system (supported on the professional version) as per your needs. There is no doubt, this cloning method will be much easier.

Method 1: ASUS SSD upgrde with disk backup and restore 

To backup disk in  ASUS laptop, plug your external hard drive and initialize it, launch this freeware, click “Disk Backup” under the Backup tab, click “+ Add Disk” to add your ASUS hard drive, then select destination path and click “Start Backup“.

To switch ASUS laptop hard drive, free up the laptop back cover with screwdrivers and place the screws in the small box, plug the plastic card in the gap, twist and move it to take off the cover, use screwsrivers to free up hard drive frame and replace with SSD, then install all stuff to the previous locations. At last, turn on the laptop and start to restore disk image.

To restore disk with backup image to your computer, plug your external hard drive contaning image and run this software, click “Restore” > “Select Image File” > “Restore the entire disk“, then select SSD as destination path and click “Start Restore“. If you are asked to backup important files first, click “OK” to continue.

In general, if your disk image is saved externally, such as, external drive, NAS, network location, you need to manually locate the image by “Select Image File”. But if your image can be detected, you can click “Select Task” as instead.

Method 2: Directly replace ASUS laptop hard drive 

This is a quick method. Unlike “Backup and Restore”, the cloned hard drive or SSD can be used to boot computer directly without restoring image file. Let’s get started.

Step 1. Plug your new SSD hard drive into laptop via connector, or directly install SSD on your desktop.  Then select “Clone” and “Disk Clone”.

Step 2. Select your ASUS hard drive (eg: disk 1) and click “Next”.

Step 3. Select your new SSD as Destination disk and click “Next”.

Step 4. Preview the Operation Summary and click “Start Clone” to run the disk cloning process. Tick “SSD Alignment” to accelerate the outputting and inputting speed of SSD.

Step 5. Take out hard drive and add the new SSD disk with screwdriver. Then, boot computer from it.

Make full use of ASUS hard drive: format it for storage

Formating old disk is the last thing to add SSD to laptop/desktop and keep HDD. As mentioned before, SSDs have a higher performace while HDDs always have a larger capacity. Therefore, if your HDD is still working well, you could consider using it as storage. Now, let’s start to format disk and restore files to HDD.

To format disk, press “Win +R” and type “diskmgmt.msc “in the box, then hit “OK” to open the Disk Management. Next, right-click the HDD disk and select “Format…“, follow on-screen instructions to finish the rest of steps.

To restore files from backup, connect your external drive with file backup, launch AOMEI Backupper, click “Restore” and “Select Image File“, select the files or folders need to be restored, tick “Restore to new location” and select HDD as storage, finally click “Start Restore“.