One relatively simple laptop repair that home users can accomplish is to upgrade the internal hard drive to a larger capacity and faster hard disk. This article looks at the advantages and disadvantages of doing this, especially in comparison to just using an external USB hard drive.
Many people are surprised to find out that upgrading your internal hard drives on a laptop is a relatively simple thing to do. The steps involve cloning the data and operating system from the original drive onto your new drive (using software), then swapping over the drives.
On the plus side, there are numerous upgrade kits around these days to simplify the cloning process and can even provide a USB harness that makes the old drive reusable afterward.
If you do not feel confident enough to open up the computer yourself, then a PC/laptop repair shop be able to do the upgrade quite quickly and cheaply.
Depending on the drive you get, doing this can vastly increase the disk capacity on your laptop and may even increase disk access times. Doing such an upgrade also extends the useful lifespan of your laptop for a few more years providing more spaces (a real necessity these days given the huge data volumes we need to store).
In comparison to opting for using an external hard drive instead of making an upgrade, the external drive is portable enough to be used from computer to computer and is easily installed into any USB port.
If you are travelling frequently with your laptop, the external drive can quickly become a source of irritation (another thing to carry) and concern if it were to be stolen or lost. The upcoming USB 3.0 specification should make external disk access a lot faster, but for the time being the internal drives will still be quicker.
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