Upgrading My Toshiba Satellite e55-a5114 Laptop

[Ev]

Hello,

I'm posting this question along with a PDF explaining what I'd like to do in terms of upgrading my Toshiba Satellite e55-a5114.

My questions are:

I. One or more of my USB ports are USB 3.0. How do I determine which are USB 2.0 and which are high-speed USB 3.0?

II. Is there any reason that my BIOS won’t allow me to upgrade from my current 1TB HDD to a 2TB HDD I just bought and received in the mail?

III. What’s the best way for me to clone my current 1TB HDD onto my new 2TB HDD? I have a number of Disk utility apps on my computer already, but if you recommend something else, I’ll use it instead. Once it’s cloned, do I have to do anything special in order to get it to work? Or can I simply swap out the HDDs and it’ll boot right up? If I'm planning on cloning my current Windows 8.1 and putting some Linux distros on it, in what order should I clone & install?

IV. Can I add more RAM to my laptop even though the official website about my Toshiba Laptop specifically says “MEMORY: 6GB DDR3L 1600MHz (Memory is not user replaceable)” If that’s just an idle warning, how much RAM can this computer take? What’s the upper-limit to the amount of RAM? How much would you recommend that would give a boost to speed but also inexpensive and made by a trustworthy?

V. I’m going to make this new 2HD HDD run multiple OSes including Windows 8.1 and 1-4 Linux distros. How much space should I reserve for each Linux distro’s mountpoints? If I make one partition and label it as “/home”, will all my Linux distros be able to use it? I’d really like to have quite a few different Linux OSes on this computer because I want to learn how to use it better!

Here's the link to the PDF with much more information about my laptop as well as all my questions about making this upgrade work as quickly and painlessly as possible.

http/bit.ly/e55-upgrade

Thanks a lot!

Yours, Ev

PS, if I have put this in the wrong forum, please tell me where to post it properly.

 

[digitaldoc]

1. USB 3.0 ports are royal blue, while USB 2.0 are black. The image linked to below illustrates this.

http/www.buildcomputers.net/images/usb-ports.jpg

2. The 2 TB drive should work in your laptop.

3. I use Clonezilla for what you are describing.

4. I would leave the 6 GB of RAM alone, and Toshiba is confirming this limitation.

5. Too many Linux distros is a formula for a problem. Don't forget you can use the Live CD version of most Linux distros to test drive it.