This means I have a reasonably fearless, (if not cavalier) attitude towards performing my own hardware upgrades.
In the past, this has meant replacing RAM modules, installing graphics cards and perhaps most commonly, speccing up my hard drive.
Of course, these days, hard drives are virtually a thing of the past and now even SATA SSD's are giving way to other form factors.
Don't know what I'm on about? Don't worry - I think I can explain it and I have a great SATA SSD for you in the meantime...
First thing you need to know; if your laptop is still running on a traditional spinning hard drive, you need to change that now - and for several reasons.
If you want a quieter, cooler, more energy efficient computer, the MX500 from Crucial is a pretty good starting point. What's more, it almost installs itself, so there's really no reason to be nervous about opening up your laptop and looking inside.
I installed the MX300 in my laptop when it came out a couple of years back and was absolutely gobsmacked at the dramatic speed improvements it made in every way - from start-up time, how quickly programs opened, even multi-tasking improved due to the faster write speeds. Until that point I'd always believed RAM upgrades were the best way to pimp your PC, but I've never seen anything like the transformation swapping out the HDD for the MX300 SSD achieved.
Now the MX500 offers even faster speeds, better reliability and best of all, free software to make changing drives easier than ever.
I've been using Acronis True Image to clone old disk drives onto new ones ever since I upgraded from my tiny 40GB to a more useful 500GB. As a cloning tool I've always found the automatic settings totally reliable and I've never lost anything in the process.
Now you can download Acronis True Image for free from the Crucial website, plug your new MX500 in, either via a SATA dock or a USB HDD enclosure and you can clone your existing drive with a few clicks of your mouse.
Depending on how much information you're copying, this can take an hour or so but then it's simply a matter of swapping your old drive out for the MX500 and you've turned your stale old laptop into a rocketship.
That's the good news.
Unfortunately, my new laptop doesn't even support a SATA form factor anymore and the latest storage modules connect via something called NVMe which allows write speeds up to seven times faster which poses the obvious question...
Why is Crucial still making obsolete technology?
Simple answer; most people are using even more obsolete technology. They want it to be less obsolete. A few hundred bucks for a new drive is a lot cheaper than a thousand or two on a whole new box.
So what did I use the MX500 for?
Now SSD's like this come in large sizes, up to 2GB in this case, they're an ideal backup drive. But I used mine for the best job ever; storing all my movies.
The MX500 is the best drive I've ever used as a media server. The fast write speed means I can save large files to it more efficiently than before, it's virtually silent and the file directory appears instantly on whatever device I access it from on my home network. So far it's been 100% reliable, whereas the HDD I used to use would sometimes disappear from sight and I'd have to reboot to get my movies back up and running again.
This is not the latest in storage drive technology, but your device probably won't run that stuff anyway. The MX500 is likely to be the closest you'll get to making your old computer seem like new - and the bundled software makes the process easy too.
Click here for more information and pricing on the Crucial MX500 SSD
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