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4 reasons adding an SSD to your old laptop makes sense
It's always a good thing if you can keep older tech from going to the landfill, and old laptops are no exception. They often work perfectly except for a few things, including the speed of the physical hard drive. The best laptops are also upgradeable, which, for older laptops, means using 2.5-inch storage drives. Adding SSD storage is the biggest boost to performance for these older computers, and here are three compelling reasons for doing just that.
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To increase overall responsiveness
Boot time and OS responsiveness will vastly improve
If your laptop is old enough to use a 2.5-inch HDD as its storage drive, swapping it out for a SATA SSD will make a huge difference in overall responsiveness, right from the moment you press the power button to turn it on. Pretty much any SATA SSD will be able to hit 500MB/s or even 550MB/s for sequential read and write speeds, right at the limit of the SATA III specifications. That's because it's a mature technology these days, and while the market is moving to NVMe storage, SATA still has a place since it's cheaper for larger drives.
Even laptops with fairly slow CPUs will benefit from an SSD transplant, often booting in seconds. It'll open files and programs faster too, but it won't speed everything up. Gamers might benefit from system responsiveness and loading times, but the storage drive speeds won't change how well the CPU and GPU in the laptop can run games. Still, users for productivity tasks are going to see a huge difference in their daily workloads, and it's highly worth installing an SSD in that case.
Adding an SSD is the best upgrade for an old PC to improve its performance
Speed up your aging PC by adding a new SSD.
To increase the storage space
Older laptops often didn't come with large drives
OEM laptop storage costs are often steeply upsold, so your old laptop probably has a fairly paltry amount of storage inside, even if it came with an SSD. Storage costs have dropped substantially since SATA or NVMe SSDs were first introduced, so adding more speedy storage space is more affordable than ever. Most laptops come with less than 2TB of storage, but you can get up to 8TB of SATA or NVMe SSD storage now.
We're not saying that you should put nearly $1,000 worth of SSD into your old laptop. That would be a waste. But if your laptop had less than 2TB of storage, upgrading it to 2TB is often less than $100 if you catch the right sales, and then you'll have plenty of storage space for documents and other files. Storage is cheap now, and it will reduce your reliance on the cloud, or having to shuffle files off your laptop every so often because of space issues.
From 2.5-inch SATA drives to more advanced M.2 NVMe drives, these are the best solid-state drives you can buy right now.
To repurpose it
Turn that laptop into something new
If you want to repurpose that old laptop, one thing you could do is turn it into a home lab. Adding an SSD will help with file recovery and any data-crunching tasks, and it'll generate less heat, which is good since that laptop will be running most of the time as a makeshift server. You might only be able to add one or two SSDs for storage, but that's what USB external drives are for, right? Thermals can also be an issue, but you can leave the lid open if your laptop vents through the lid hinge.
The speed of opening files from an SSD also means that an old laptop can be reused as a digital cookbook, ready to scroll through your favorites at a moment's notice. As it's old, you probably won't worry about the odd splash of béchamel sauce on the screen or the greasy fingerprints on the touchpad or keys. Or turn it into a retro game emulator, and work through the games of your childhood that you never got the chance to finish. Even the most modest laptops can handle that, as retro emulation is fairly lightweight on the system, and with an SSD in, they'll load like lightning. Dolphin Emulator is a good one, with support for GameCube and Wii games that only needs 2GB of RAM to run, perfect for that old laptop.
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Adding an SSD to an old laptop can give it a few more years of useful life
If you've got an old but upgradeable laptop, adding an SSD is the biggest upgrade you can do in terms of speed and responsiveness. Then you have a perfectly serviceable machine, ready for a few more years of life. If the rest of the hardware on the laptop isn't quite up to the task of running Windows 11, you could consider turning it into a Chromebook or a similarly lightweight version of Linux.
