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If you buy an external SSD, you get much fewer options. With an enclosure, you can choose if you want an attached USB cable or just a USB port, drop resistance or slim design, water resistance, electrostatic resistance, lights or no lights, and other things such as color and material. If you get an external drive, you are stuck with the features they offer which I find to be less than what you can get with an enclosure. I would recommend a good notebook SSD from a good company in an external enclosure you purchase for your lifestyle and desires. A warranty is great for replacing the drive but it will not replace what is on that drive. You can get a lot of garbage and with something such as a primary drive you do not want to one day have a dead computer. Do not choose based on the largest SSD you can get for a particular price. Purchase the largest SSD you can afford from a good company. Your SSD is almost full, but what about your hard drive (if there is one)?
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So, if you want concrete advice, you have to tell us what kind of storage is already in your laptop and how you're using it. You'd have to buy an M.2 to USB adapter however for the new one so that you can clone the data from the built-in SSD to it before performing the swap. Since the operating system is on the M.2 SSD, you have to clone it first if you want to swap the existing SSD out without having to reinstall everything. If there already is a hard drive, you have two options: Swap out the existing M.2 SSD for a larger one or the SATA hard drive for a SATA SSD.
#Best cheap external ssd drive upgrade
If your laptop only has that SSD and no hard drive installed, the easiest upgrade would be to just get a SATA SSD and plop it in.
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Swapping these out is just as easy as with M.2 drives, most of the time at least. Here's the size difference between a SATA and an M.2 drive: Here's what the port looks like on a laptop:ĭrives using this port tend to be larger. SATA is an older, slower standard (still fine for gaming however), originally used by hard drives, but also by SSDs. This kind of SSD can easily be swapped out by the user. Note that there are shorter and longer M.2 SSDs:Ĭheck the maximum length of your M.2 slot first before buying a new one.Īccording to one review on the Internet, your laptop probably has a 256 GB SSD. M.2 is a standard used by internal SSDs (and a few other devices).
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