Upgrading laptop hard drive to M.2 ssd

[srobison025]

High and thanks to everyone reading this.

So I have a Dell Inspirion 15 Laptop and I'm looking to upgrade the storage on it. Right now it just has the turtle slow 1TB 5200 RPM HDD. I have a 250GB Samsung M.2 drive that is compatible with my laptop and a new 500GB Samsung SSD.

What I'm wanting to do is install the OS on to the M.2 drive and use the 500GB for storage. I have never swapped out the hard drive on a laptop before. Is it possible to do a clean Windows 10 install on the M.2 device? I am assuming that because of all the drivers installed on the laptop things like wifi, bluetooth, and such that it might not be a good idea. Right now there's nothing really on my laptop. Do I need to clone the HDD to the M.2 then install the SSD afterwards? I'm hoping it's that simple and someone can point me in the direction of how to clone drives in Windows 10.

Thanks again and sorry if my post is a little incoherent. It makes sense in my head hopefully I made sense typing this out.

 

[fastflight]

I THINK that you could, I have the same laptop, try copying the hdd to the m.2 and add the ssd and then sort the files from there

 

[jaguarskx]

Yes, you can install a clean version of Windows 10 on the laptop. You will need an 8GB USB drive to do so though (I assume your laptop does not have a DVD drive). They are pretty cheap, I bought one last year from BestBuy for something like $5 or $6 when not on sale.

You will need to download the Windows 10 Installation Media in the following link

https/www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10


After the installation USB is created you should turn off your laptop, remove the hard drive, install the m.2 SSD, and lastly the USB drive. Don't install the 2nd SSD drive yet, I've read that if there is more than one drive present when installing Windows 10, then data will be written to both drives. Should you remove the 2nd SSD, then Windows will not boot up. Not sure how true that is or if it was an actual problem that has been fixed.

With the m.2 SSD installed and the USB drive plugged in, simply turn on the laptop to begin the installation. Because Windows 10 was already installed the authentication data is has been stored in the laptop's BIOS.