Hard Drive Cloning & SSD Upgrades

Why this is the upgrade worth doing

If your computer takes minutes to become usable after you turn it on, the drive is almost certainly why. Mechanical hard drives have physical spinning platters and a moving head, and that mechanism is the slowest part of any computer by an enormous margin: slower than the processor, slower than the memory, slower than everything.

Swapping to a solid-state drive removes that bottleneck entirely. Boot times typically drop from minutes to seconds, programs open immediately instead of hanging, and the general stuttering that makes an old machine feel broken mostly disappears. It's the one upgrade that reliably changes how a computer feels to use.

It's also the cheapest way out of a "my computer is too slow, I need a new one" situation. Plenty of machines people were ready to replace just needed this.

What cloning actually means

Cloning makes an exact copy of your existing drive onto the new one, not a fresh install. Windows, your programs, your files, your settings, your browser bookmarks, your saved passwords, the printer you set up three years ago: all of it comes across exactly as it is.

You turn the machine on afterwards and it looks identical. It's just fast. There is nothing to reinstall and nothing to set up again, which is the part people dread most about getting a new computer.

What it costs

The cloning work is $120. The SSD itself is separate. Prices depend on the capacity you need, and you're welcome to supply your own if you'd rather buy it yourself.

We'll advise on sizing. Most people need less than they think: if your current drive is a 1 TB disk with 200 GB used, there's no reason to buy 1 TB of SSD.

Your old drive comes back to you. It's a perfectly good backup of everything as it was on the day of the upgrade, which is worth keeping for a while.

Worth knowing first

• If your current drive is failing, cloning may not be the right move. Cloning reads every sector, and a dying drive may not survive it. If yours is clicking or throwing errors, that's a data recovery job first.
• Some very old laptops are sealed or use non-standard drives. Ask and we'll check.
• An SSD fixes slowness caused by the drive. It won't fix a malware infection: see virus removal for that.
• If your machine is also short on memory, doing both at once is usually the better call.

Is it worth it for my computer?

Generally: if the machine is otherwise healthy and still does what you need, yes, emphatically. If it's ten years old with a failing screen and a dead battery, the money is better spent elsewhere, and we'll tell you that rather than take the job.

Not sure? Bring it in or call and describe it. Honest advice on repair-versus-replace is free.

Tell us what it’s doing.

Quotes are free, and we’ll point you at the cheapest thing that actually solves it.