Which SSD to buy for a laptop or desktop

Buy a PCIe Gen4 TLC NVMe SSD in the length the machine takes, usually M.2 2280, if it has an M.2 slot wired for NVMe, and a 2.5-inch SATA SSD if it has only a drive bay; if storage is soldered to the board, no SSD will fit. Such a machine, like every current MacBook, takes a USB drive for room instead. Pay for Gen5 only with a Gen5 slot, room to cool it and huge files to move, because game load tests put the gap between generations at about a second. 1 TB is the comfortable size and 512 GB the least for a Windows machine meant to last. You can find out what your machine takes in about five minutes, from its maker’s spec sheet and one line in PowerShell, and the steps come next. This site lists prices for all computers but holds no fit data for any laptop or desktop, so the maker’s document settles what fits. Before you copy or open anything, get your BitLocker recovery key.

In plain words: SATA and NVMe are the two links an SSD uses, and NVMe is the faster. M.2 is the stick-shaped drive and 2.5-inch the small flat box. Gen4 is the generation of NVMe’s link. TLC and the cheaper QLC are kinds of flash. The sections below explain each.

What to do in a few minutes

1. Find the exact model. It is on the sticker under a laptop. In Windows, type msinfo32 in Start to open System Information and read System Model. On a desktop you built, read BaseBoard Product, which names the motherboard.
2. Read that model’s spec sheet or service manual on the maker’s own site. You want three answers: is the storage soldered to the board, is there an M.2 slot, a 2.5-inch bay or both, and for M.2, which length and which wiring: NVMe, SATA or both. The examples below show what those pages look like.
3. See what is in there now, with the line below this list: type PowerShell in Start and paste it. It tells you what is fitted, not what an empty slot can do.
4. Pick the drive from the table below.
5. Before you touch the old drive, get your BitLocker recovery key and copy anything you cannot lose to a separate drive.
6. Compare prices at NVMe SSDs and SATA SSDs, or by size at 1 TB NVMe and 1 TB SATA. The NVMe pages list M.2 and U.2 alike, so read the Form factor column: U.2 will not go in an M.2 slot. No page here is sorted by 2230 or 2242, so read the length in the title and on the maker’s page.

Get-PhysicalDisk | Format-Table FriendlyName, MediaType, BusType, Size

MediaType reads HDD, SSD or Unspecified and BusType reads SATA, NVMe or USB among others (Microsoft’s class reference). It can read RAID on a machine using Intel’s VMD, covered below. If it says HDD, the swap to any SSD is the biggest upgrade that machine can get.

If the machine already has an SSD and feels slow with many things open, the drive may not be the problem: how much RAM you need and upgrading laptop RAM cover that side.

What your machine takes, read from its maker

This site cannot tell you which SSD fits your machine. It has prices for all computers and no fit data for laptops or desktops, so nothing on a listing page here means a drive fits yours. The maker’s document decides, and it is usually a short read. These are examples of what such documents say, read from each maker. They are here to show how much the answer varies, not as a list to look your machine up in.

Lenovo’s sheets put a limit beside each slot, up to 2 TB on the X1 Carbon, with a note that the figure “is based on the test results with current Lenovo storage offerings”. That reads as what was tested and not as a hard ceiling. It is no promise that a larger drive works, either.

Look inside if the document is vague. A 2.5-inch bay holds a flat box 100 by 70 mm with a SATA plug at one end. An M.2 slot holds a bare stick 22 mm wide, kept down by one small screw or a latch at the far end. A laptop’s service manual shows how to reach them, and the maker’s terms say what opening it does to the warranty.

Then use Windows to confirm what is fitted. None of these tools can report what an empty slot can do, which is why the document comes first.

• Device Manager lists the model under Disk drives. Under Storage controllers, an entry named Intel RST VMD Controller tells you the machine uses VMD.
• CrystalDiskInfo, free under the MIT License, prints the Interface and the Transfer Mode as “Current Transfer Mode | Supported Transfer Mode”. If the left value is lower than the right, the slot or the link is holding the drive back. That reading is an inference from the manual’s wording, and the same check on Linux is lspci.

M.2 is a shape, not a speed

M.2 names the shape of a card and its socket, and nothing about speed. Dell’s buying page says of the 2280 size that “Some drives in this size use SATA instead”. A slot can be PCIe only, PCIe and SATA, or SATA only, and the ASUS boards above show the first two on one board.

The notch is a hint. Almost all M.2 NVMe drives have one notch, the M key, and almost all M.2 SATA drives have two, B+M. That is a market convention and not a rule, so drive interfaces owns the detail and the advice stands: confirm against the maker’s page for the part number, not the eBay title.

A wrong pairing fails silently. An NVMe drive in a socket wired only for SATA slides in, screws down and does not exist. There is no error message. The machine behaves as if the slot were empty. Sockets like that were common in mid-2010s laptops. The reverse happens too: an M.2 SATA drive in a PCIe-only slot, as in two of the three slots on the PRIME Z790-P WIFI, is just as absent. Looking at the socket will not tell you, because the wiring is on the board. Only the maker’s document does.

Length: 2230, 2242, 2260, 2280

The four digits are width then length in millimeters. A slot takes only the lengths it has a screw position for, so the wrong length has nothing to hold it down.

Desktop boards are generous and most list several lengths, but not always the short ones: the PRIME Z890-P WIFI’s M.2_1 lists 2280 and 22110 and no 2242. Read it per slot. Sandisk’s Optimus GX 7100M sheet is a good picture of the short class: an M.2 2230 drive named for the Steam Deck, MSI Claw, Surface and Dell laptops.

One side or two, in a thin laptop

Some drives carry parts on one face of the board and some on both. Dell’s page says “That difference can matter inside a thin laptop, where the space beneath the drive may be limited”. iFixit (December 17, 2025) describes the Steam Deck’s as “a single-sided M.2 2230”, though Valve’s own spec page gives no form factor. Sandisk prints the class in the 7100M’s form factor, 2230-S3-M, where S means single-sided, and drive interfaces explains the codes.

Height is the number to compare. Most of the 2280 sheets used here give 2.3 to 2.38 mm, but the 8 TB Gen5 models are 3.88 mm, and Samsung’s 9100 PRO sheet says of its 8 TB model “Please check the specifications of the host device before installation”. If your machine’s manual states a thickness class or a height, it means it. If it states neither, compare the drive’s sheet with what is fitted now and stay at or under that height.

Gen3, Gen4 or Gen5: what you will feel

Each PCIe generation doubles the ceiling: 3,938, 7,877 and 15,754 MB/s at four lanes, written x4, for Gen3, Gen4 and Gen5. Those are numbers for copying one huge file between two very fast drives. Starting Windows and loading a game are mostly small scattered reads, and PCWorld says the same of games: “the speed that makes the most difference for loading games is random read/write speed”. The measured gaps are small.

The XDA numbers come from one author on an unnamed system, and the other two are older, so read them as a size of effect and not as a law. The same pattern runs through them: SATA to NVMe saves a few seconds at boot and about a second a load, and PCWorld’s guide to the best SSDs (updated October 3, 2026) says of Gen5 that “most users won’t notice much difference in normal Windows use or gaming”. HDD or SSD has the arithmetic for why a hard drive is a different world.

DirectStorage is the exception, and a narrow one. It is a Windows feature a game has to be built for. In Forspoken, PCWorld (February 2, 2023) measured one scene at 7.4 s on a Samsung 860 EVO SATA drive and 1.9 s on an MSI M480 Gen4 drive. It also wrote that “DirectStorage will have very little impact on the vast majority of existing games”. Above SATA the gap closes again: a test reported by Notebookcheck took all seven scenes in 13.838 s on Gen3, 10.872 s on Gen4 and 10.483 s on Gen5. It is a reason to choose NVMe over SATA, and no reason to choose Gen5 over Gen4.

When Gen5 is worth it

Gen5 pays when both ends of a large copy are fast, which means video and similar work that moves hundreds of gigabytes between two fast drives. On the makers’ sheets a 450 GB copy would take about 65 s at the 990 PRO’s 6,900 MB/s and about 34 s at the 9100 PRO’s 13,300 MB/s, if both ends held those speeds all the way. They may not: PCWorld’s T700 review noted its Gen5 test drew from a Gen4 drive, and a February 7, 2025 update says the T700 later “showed a marked tendency to slow drastically”. That is about 30 seconds saved for each 450 GB at best, and it costs more than money:

• It needs the slot, and many recent machines lack one. The TUF GAMING Z790-PLUS WIFI has Gen5 on the graphics slot and Gen4 on every M.2 slot. The PRIME Z790-P WIFI’s M.2 slots are Gen4 too.
• It can cost graphics lanes. On the ProArt X870E-CREATOR WIFI, “When M.2_2 is enabled, PCIEX16(G5)_1 will run x8”.
• The processor can take it away. That same board runs M.2_1 at Gen4 with a Ryzen 8000 processor and does not support M.2_2 at all, and Lenovo says a Gen5 drive “is downgraded to PCIe 4.0 x4 performance” on the X1 Carbon Gen 13’s U series models.
• It runs hotter, as the makers’ wattages show, and cost about $59 more than Gen4 at 1 TB on this site’s figures.
• “Gen5” on a listing may not mean four lanes. Samsung’s 990 EVO Plus is “PCIe 4.0 x4 / 5.0 x2”, with a top read of 7,250 MB/s: a Gen4 drive’s speed.

A newer drive in an older slot

It works, and nothing announces that it is capped. Samsung’s 990 PRO is “backward compatible with PCIe 3.0”, and Sandisk’s SN7100 sheet lists Gen3 and Gen2 down to one lane. PCWorld puts it plainly: “An NVMe SSD won’t perform any faster than the PCIe generation of the CPU/motherboard it’s installed in”. Lenovo says the same of a real machine: on the IdeaPad 1 14IGL7, “The SSD with PCIe 4.0 x4 is downgraded to closer to PCIe 2.0 due to Intel platform limitations”.

So do not pay extra for a generation the slot cannot use, and do not refuse a Gen4 drive for a Gen3 slot if it costs about the same. On November 1, 2026 a new Gen3 M.2 drive saved only about $29 a drive at 1 TB and $18 at 2 TB.

DRAM or DRAM-less, TLC or QLC

These two questions decide how a drive behaves once it is busy, and an eBay title rarely states either. Read them on the maker’s sheet for the part number. The table is a set of classes, each with its maker’s own sheet, and none of them is being called the best buy.

Makers test differently, so treat the power column as a rough order. Names are moving too. Sandisk’s split from Western Digital renamed these lines in 2026: WD Blue becomes Optimus, and the WD_BLACK SN7100 and SN8100 become Optimus GX and GX Pro, with hardware that “isn’t changing” for now. Listings will carry both names. And Micron said on December 3, 2025 that it was leaving the Crucial consumer business, with shipments to the end of February 2026 and warranty service continuing, so Crucial stock on eBay is the end of a line.

DRAM against DRAM-less

An SSD keeps a map of where each piece of data really sits. A drive with DRAM keeps the map in its own memory chip. A DRAM-less NVMe drive uses Host Memory Buffer (HMB): it borrows a small piece of your computer’s memory over the PCIe link. SSD endurance works through what that means for the map at each size.

For a home user the cost is small. PCWorld’s guide says “If you want the best overall, and especially random performance, then you want a DRAM design”, and that “HMB designs are often half the price”. Its longer piece on HMB (2022, with testing as of November 2023) says “HMB doesn’t use a lot of system memory” and “Random performance, as expected, still lags”, and advises against HMB for “on-the-clock computing”. How-To Geek (February 19, 2026) calls the penalty “a couple of extra seconds of boot time”, leaning on one review. None of these is a controlled test of ordinary home use, and this guide found none. The fair reading: for browsing, office work and games, a good DRAM-less Gen4 TLC NVMe drive is enough, and the money is better spent on capacity. Pay for DRAM if the machine earns its keep writing all day.

Two cautions. HMB is an NVMe feature (Microsoft’s driver table lists it), so a DRAM-less SATA drive has neither DRAM nor the borrowed memory. That is an inference from what HMB is, and it is a reason to prefer a SATA drive with DRAM, such as the class above. And HMB can bite through firmware, the drive’s own built-in software: Windows 11 24H2 changed how it is allocated, and heise reported on October 17, 2024 that the WD Black SN770 and SN770M, WD Blue SN580 and SN5000 and Sandisk Extreme M.2 crashed until updated to firmware 731130WD, 281050WD or 291020WD, delivered only through the maker’s Windows dashboard tool. So after fitting any drive, and above all an older used one, open the maker’s tool, back up, and check its firmware.

TLC against QLC, and the fall-off on a long write

TLC stores three bits in a cell and QLC four, which makes QLC cheaper and slower to write. Consumer drives hide that behind a fast cache, so the headline speed lasts until the cache fills. Samsung states the drop for its own two SATA drives. The 870 QVO is QLC, rated 530 MB/s write, and “Performances after Intelligent Turbowrite are 80 MB/s (1TB), 160 MB/s (2/4/8TB)”. The 870 EVO is TLC, and after the same cache it holds 300 MB/s at 250 and 500 GB and 530 MB/s from 1 TB up. What that does to a copy, as a sum from those sheets:

Each 100 GB written once the fast cache is full

  870 QVO 1 TB     100,000 MB /  80 MB/s  = 1,250 s  = about 21 minutes
  870 QVO 2 TB     100,000 MB / 160 MB/s  =   625 s  = about 10 minutes
  870 EVO 1 TB     100,000 MB / 530 MB/s  =   189 s  = about 3 minutes

Faster buses do not cure it: How-To Geek reports TechPowerUp’s finding that the Gen4 QLC WD Blue SN5100 “drops to a measly 400MB/s once its SLC cache fills up”, and PCWorld lists “QLC slows down during very long writes” against it. SSD endurance explains the cache.

So judge QLC by the job. A drive that mostly gets read, such as a game library or a media collection, rarely fills the cache, and a large QLC drive suits it if the saving is real. A system drive that takes big installs, or anything that swallows video all day, is where TLC earns its price. Do not read these as good and bad: the 870 QVO has DRAM, and PCWorld’s first choice, the SN7100, does not.

TBW is the warranty’s limit on writing, in terabytes. At 30 GB a day, a 600 TBW drive takes 55 years to reach it and the 870 QVO’s 360 TBW about 33, so for home use it will not decide anything. The warranty period can: Samsung gives the 870 QVO three years and the 870 EVO five. SSD endurance is the home for the rest.

Heat: which drives need a heatsink

Heat follows speed. On the sheets above, a SATA drive averages about 2 W, a Gen4 drive with Host Memory Buffer about 4 W, a Gen4 drive with DRAM 5 to 6 W, and a Gen5 drive 6 to 8 W at 1 TB. M.2 is a 3.3 V slot, so all of that leaves through a stick of bare board.

This table is this guide’s reading of those numbers and not a maker’s rule:

The makers’ limits are measured by the drive itself: 0 to 70 C on Samsung’s sheets, with “Proper airflow recommended”, and 0 to 85 C on Sandisk’s. Samsung’s 990 PRO figures come from “a fan cooling desktop system”, which a laptop is not. Corsair’s explainer, from a company that sells heatsinks, says later Gen4 drives “require better cooling” and “You can’t run these drives optimally without a heatspreader”. It also says a hot drive throttles and then recovers, and that time outside the limits “shouldn’t have any long-lasting impact”. So on most machines heat costs speed and not data.

The exception was early Gen5. PCWorld reported on May 11, 2023 that an uncooled Corsair MP700 could produce file-system errors or shut the PC down, and that Phison had changed the throttle curve in response. That was the first wave of Gen5 drives. Fit Gen5 cooled anyway.

A heatsink model is not for a laptop, and you cannot strip one. The 9100 PRO with Heatsink is 8.88 mm tall against 2.38 mm for the bare drive, and 25 mm wide. Samsung says the heatsink “should not be removed as it can damage the device”, and that the warranty is void if it is. This guide found no measurement of a Gen5 drive inside a laptop, so that row of the table is caution and not data.

When a 2.5-inch SATA SSD is still right

Buy one when the machine has a 2.5-inch bay and no NVMe slot, when a desktop has a free bay and no free M.2 slot, or when you want a second drive for data and SATA is what is spare. PCWorld says SATA is “mainly worth considering for older PCs that don’t support NVMe”. The other old reason, that SATA is cheap, has gone. On this site’s figures a new 500 GB SATA SSD cost more than a new M.2 NVMe drive of that size, at 1 TB they were about level, and elsewhere SATA saved about 10 percent. If your slot takes NVMe, buy NVMe.

Old laptop with a hard drive: the biggest upgrade it can have. A 5,400 rpm disk manages about 60 random reads a second where Samsung rates the 870 EVO at up to 13,000, and HDD or SSD has the sum. Starting Windows and opening programs are mostly those reads, so the machine changes character. The plug is the same, so you take out one 2.5-inch drive and put in another.

Height. The bay decides. The ThinkPad T440p sheet takes an SSD “7mm high” and a hard drive “7mm or 9.5mm high”. Samsung’s 870 drives are 6.8 mm. A 7 mm drive goes into a taller bay and can sit loose. A spacer is the usual fix, but do not count on one being in the box. A 9.5 mm drive will not go into a 7 mm bay.

In a desktop you also need a SATA data cable to the board, a free power lead from the supply, and often a 2.5-to-3.5-inch bracket if the case has only large bays. Check first that the port you plan to use stays on. As the PRIME B550-PLUS shows, a filled M.2 slot can switch SATA ports off.

How big to buy

How much storage you need owns this. In brief: 512 GB is the least for a Windows machine meant to last and 1 TB the comfortable size, and 1 TB holds about six big new games and 2 TB about fourteen. Keep 15 to 20 percent free, because a full SSD slows down. Windows shows a 1 TB drive as 931 GB, which is the units and not a fault. Small drives are also slower, as the 870 EVO’s figures above show and HDD or SSD explains. A console has its own rules, in the PS5 and Xbox section.

What it costs: site figures for November 1, 2026

These are this site’s own figures: the median Buy It Now price per terabyte of single-drive listings on its US catalog, fetched on November 1, 2026, item price only with shipping excluded and rows with no stated shipping left out. They are eBay asking prices, so a retailer with stock may be lower, and they use the same filter as HDD or SSD. Add shipping to your own sum. Trends follows the market from here.

Per drive, new, that is about $249 for a 1 TB M.2 NVMe and $241 for a 1 TB SATA, and about $440 and $391 at 2 TB. Three things stand out. Little is left of the SATA discount: at 500 GB SATA costs more ($199 a drive against $169), at 1 TB about the same, and at 512 GB and from 2 TB up it saves about 10 percent. 500 and 512 GB are different markets, with a new 512 GB drive cheaper than a new 500 GB one on both buses, so search for both. And used takes about 44 percent off at 1 TB, with risks of its own.

The generation and the length show only where a listing states them, which on those M.2 NVMe rows was 4,150 of 11,200 for generation and 7,086 of 11,200 for length. These are new drives at 1 and 2 TB, per terabyte:

So Gen5 cost about $59 a drive more than Gen4 at 1 TB and about $49 more at 2 TB. Gen3 was no great bargain. A 2230 drive cost no more than a 2280, while 2242 is scarce and dear, which matters if you own a machine that takes only 2242. All of this is a shortage market, and every dollar here will go stale: the 2026 storage price guide says why prices rose, and buy storage now or wait deals with timing.

Before you copy anything: get your BitLocker recovery key

This is the step that can lose your files, so it comes before any tool. Many people have BitLocker on without knowing. Microsoft’s BitLocker overview (August 24, 2026) says that since Windows 11 version 24H2 “more devices are eligible for automatic and manual device encryption”, and that when an administrator uses a Microsoft account to sign in, “a recovery key is uploaded to the online Microsoft account”. It happens on Windows Home too, under the name Device Encryption. A machine with only local accounts is encrypted but, in Microsoft’s words, “remains unprotected”.

A drive swap can set it off. Microsoft’s recovery list (July 29, 2025) includes “Changes to the NTFS partition table on the disk”, “Changes to the boot manager”, and “Moving a BitLocker-protected drive into a new computer”. Then the machine stops at a recovery screen asking for a 48-digit number. Without it, Microsoft says you will have to reset the device, and “Resetting your device will remove all of your files”. It also says “Microsoft Support doesn’t have the ability to retrieve, provide, or recreate a lost BitLocker recovery key”.

1. Find the key from another device. Sign in at aka.ms/myrecoverykey with your Microsoft account, or at aka.ms/aadrecoverykey if a work or school account has ever signed in to the machine. If someone else set the machine up, the key may be in their account. A printout or USB stick from when BitLocker was turned on also counts.
2. See whether the drive is encrypted. Settings, Privacy & security, Device encryption shows a switch on machines that have it. In a terminal opened as administrator (right-click Start, then Terminal (Admin), or Windows PowerShell (Admin) on Windows 10), manage-bde -status C: prints the state and the protectors. Fully Decrypted means there is no key to find. These commands are widely reported to work on Windows Home, but Microsoft’s pages do not say so; if one refuses, rely on the switch and your account’s key.
3. If the account has no key, read it off the machine while it still works. As administrator, manage-bde -protectors -get C: lists the protectors, including the Numerical Password, which is the 48-digit number. If none is listed, manage-bde -protectors -add C: -RecoveryPassword makes one. Write it on paper or put it on a different device. A key saved only on the drive you are about to replace is no key.
4. Check it is this machine’s key. The account page lists keys by key ID, and manage-bde -protectors -get C: prints the ID for this volume. They must match.
5. Back up what you cannot lose to a separate drive. A clone is not a backup, because a clone that goes wrong may take the source with it if you pick the wrong direction.

Moving your system across: the usual free tools are gone

The free Windows programs most advice names no longer clone a system disk. Macrium Reflect Free, the usual recommendation, has been retired: a rival’s page reports no free version and no further patches or security updates from January 1, 2024, and Macrium’s own licensing page describes Reflect X with no free edition. The tools that replaced it in that advice have gone the same way: Hasleo says “The free edition does not support cloning the system disk” in its edition table, though its marketing page still advertises free Windows migration, and AOMEI says “The Free Standard Edition only supports cloning a data disk”. These are the routes left.

Hasleo’s free edition leaves one more path: it backs up and restores for free, so you can save an image to a third drive and restore it to the new one. Its table says the free edition does not keep BitLocker through a restore, and that it is free for home users.

How to choose. If your new drive’s maker offers a tool and your drive qualifies, use that. If not and you value the time, pay for one. If you are careful and the new drive is the same size or larger, Rescuezilla can do it for nothing. If the system is old, cluttered or misbehaving, a clean install is often the better result anyway.

What each tool does with BitLocker

Handle this before the clone, and read your tool’s own page, because they differ:

• Samsung’s 2020 manual says you must remove encryption first.
• Macrium lists three outcomes and says they “also apply when cloning”. Your running, unlocked C: copied to a new blank drive comes out “in the clear”, with BitLocker removed, and you turn it back on afterward.
• Rescuezilla has an open request to decrypt BitLocker volumes, so treat it as not handling them and decrypt first.
• AOMEI and Acronis True Image: this guide could not confirm how their current home editions behave, so assume nothing and get the key first.

Decrypt, if the tool needs it. Turn off the switch on the Device encryption page or, on Pro, run manage-bde -off C: as administrator, then wait: decryption takes time, and manage-bde -status C: shows the percentage. Microsoft says decryption “should occur when protection is no longer required”, so do it for the move and turn encryption back on after.

Suspend, if your tool copies the volume still encrypted. If its page does not say, decrypting is the plain route. Microsoft says recovery can be avoided in a planned change by suspending, and the catch is in the default: suspension ends at the next restart unless you say otherwise. A swap has several restarts, so as administrator in PowerShell:

Suspend-BitLocker -MountPoint "C:" -RebootCount 0
# after the new drive has started Windows normally:
Resume-BitLocker -MountPoint "C:"

If Windows Home refuses the command, decrypt instead. Suspension leaves the data encrypted and the key “available to everyone in the clear”. The old drive keeps that state if you clone while suspended, and a drive cloned after decrypting holds plain data. Treat the old drive as unencrypted, and erase it before it leaves your hands.

If a rescue stick will not boot with Secure Boot on, Microsoft does allow turning it off for install media, on its download page. But Secure Boot and BitLocker are tied together: Microsoft’s OEM guide says to suspend BitLocker on devices tied to those settings (its term is bound to PCR 7) if a firmware update changes the Secure Boot policy. So suspend before you change it, and turn it back on after. Turning it on can start encryption by itself on a machine that did not qualify before, as the BitLocker overview says, so check for a key again afterward.

The clone, step by step

1. Connect the new drive. On a desktop or a laptop with a second slot, fit it there. On a machine with one slot, use a USB enclosure for an M.2 drive or a USB-to-SATA adapter for a 2.5-inch one, and match the enclosure to the drive, because an NVMe enclosure may not take an M.2 SATA stick. Samsung warns its tool “may not function properly because of the USB adapter”, so a slot beats USB where you have the choice.
2. Pick source and target with care. Everything on the target is erased. Check the model names and sizes on the screen before you start, using the Get-PhysicalDisk line above.
3. Size the partitions during the clone. Macrium offers “Shrink or expand to fill the target disk” and Samsung’s tool has a slide bar for each volume. If you skip this, a larger drive shows unused space at the end that is awkward to claim, as the next part explains. Rescuezilla needs the final partition to fit the destination and says to shrink it first with GParted, after saving an untouched image elsewhere. Prefer a target at least as large.
4. Power off, unplug, and swap the drives. Touch bare metal first, follow the service manual, and if it tells you to disconnect the battery, do. Hold an M.2 stick by its edges. It slides in at a slight angle, is pressed flat and is held by one small screw, just snug, or a latch.
5. Start with the old drive out. A clone carries the same disk identifiers, and Rescuezilla’s maintainer, in an open bug about this, says “It’s highly recommended you disconnect one of your disks”. With both connected, the machine may boot the wrong one.
6. If it does not boot, open the firmware settings, the machine’s BIOS or UEFI menus, and put the new drive first: Settings, System, Recovery, Advanced startup, Restart now, Troubleshoot, Advanced options, UEFI Firmware Settings. If Windows will not start, Microsoft lists Esc, Delete, F1, F2, F10, F11 and F12 as the common keys.
7. If it asks for the recovery key, type the 48 digits.
8. Then finish: Resume-BitLocker if you suspended, or switch encryption back on if the copy is decrypted, and read after the swap. Keep the old drive untouched for some days, until the new one has proved itself.

MBR, GPT and old machines

MBR and GPT are two ways to lay out a disk, and UEFI is the firmware that boots from GPT. Run Get-Disk | ft -Auto and read Partition Style. GPT is what current machines use, and Windows needs it to use more than 2 TB. Samsung’s manual warns that when the old system cannot use GPT, a clone to a drive over 2 TB stays MBR and “the space exceeding 2TB will remain unallocated”.

Microsoft’s MBR2GPT converts a system disk in place, as long as it has at most three primary partitions and no extended one. “These changes cannot be undone!” is its own message, and the firmware must then be switched to UEFI, so make sure the machine supports UEFI first. Encrypted disks need protection suspended, and “the existing protectors need to be deleted and then recreated” afterward. Check first, as administrator, and convert only if it passes. Back up before this one.

mbr2gpt /validate /disk:0 /allowFullOS
mbr2gpt /convert /disk:0 /allowFullOS

Use the disk number that Get-Disk shows for the system drive. On a machine this old, also ask whether it can start Windows from NVMe at all. An NVMe drive on a PCIe adapter card gives an older desktop fast storage, but whether the firmware will boot from it is a question for the board’s maker. A 2.5-inch SATA SSD has no such question.

Clean install, and the new drive that does not appear

A clean install gives you a fresh Windows on the new drive, at the cost of reinstalling programs. Copy your files to a separate drive first, and link your Microsoft account to your Windows license. Microsoft calls that essential for reactivating after a major hardware change, and it names a motherboard swap as the example without naming a drive. Then use Microsoft’s download page: the current release is Windows 11 version 26H2, the tool asks for a blank USB stick of at least 8 GB, and it makes media for x64 processors only. On a PC below Windows 11’s requirements Microsoft warns against this media, so clone instead. Fit the new drive, boot from the stick, and follow the installer. The installer erases the drive you pick, so take the old drive out first if you can, and otherwise choose by size. An encrypted old drive then opens only with its recovery key, so keep that key. If you sign in with a Microsoft account on an eligible machine, encryption starts by itself and a new key goes to your account, so note it there.

If the installer shows no drives on an Intel machine, suspect VMD first. ASUS (April 7, 2026) and Dell (May 10, 2026) both document it for Intel 11th to 14th Gen machines: retail Windows media cannot see a drive behind Intel’s Volume Management Device without its driver. Dell lists Inspiron, Latitude, XPS, OptiPlex and others. The fix is the same in both:

1. On another computer, download the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver from your exact model’s support page, and extract it to the USB stick.
2. In the installer, at the screen with no drives, choose Load driver, then Browse.
3. Pick the extracted RST or VMD folder (Dell’s is VMD or f6vmdflpy-x64), select Intel RST VMD Controller, and continue. The drive appears.

ASUS adds that on Core Ultra Lunar Lake and newer you need no manual driver with Windows 11 24H2 or later. Dell says images made with its own OS Recovery Tool do not hit the problem. ASUS also gives a firmware switch, on its machines under Advanced, VMD setup menu, “Enable VMD controller”, and warns that this gives up RAID.

Use that switch only before a clean install. On a machine with Windows already installed, changing it can stop Windows from starting: Microsoft lists “Changes to the storage controller mode or settings in the BIOS” among the causes of the Inaccessible Boot Device stop error (February 12, 2026, written for Windows 10). If you turned it off, turn it back on before you start the old drive again. A clone is not affected by any of this, because the copied Windows already has its driver.

After the swap

Check TRIM. TRIM tells the drive which space is free. Microsoft says it is on by default for NTFS unless an administrator disabled it. To see, in a terminal opened as administrator:

fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

NTFS DisableDeleteNotify = 0 means TRIM is on, and a 1 means it is off. SSD endurance says why it matters.

Claim any space left over. If C: did not grow during the clone, Disk Management’s Extend Volume may be grayed out. Microsoft explains that the free space must sit immediately after the volume, and on many machines a recovery partition sits between them. Its options are to delete that partition, to use a partitioning tool that can move it, or to make the free space a separate volume, which is the safe one for a beginner. That is why step 3 above sizes things during the clone. Do not start deleting partitions you cannot name.

Update the firmware with the maker’s tool: Samsung Magician, or Sandisk’s Dashboard, on Windows. The HMB crashes are the reason. Back up first.

Read the new drive once in CrystalDiskInfo, and note its hours and writes; buying used drives on eBay shows what the rows mean. Once the new drive has proved itself, put the old one to use: in the enclosure you bought, it can hold a second copy of your files.

Listings that will not fit, and prices that are not real

SAS, U.2, U.3 and EDSFF will not fit an ordinary PC. They are server shapes, and they are common on eBay. Of the 80,765 SSD rows on this site’s November 1, 2026 filter, 16,998 were SAS. Of the 19,772 NVMe rows, 4,645 were U.2, U.3 or EDSFF, and 11,200 were read as M.2. So every SSD and NVMe include drives you cannot use, with a warning above any table holding SAS rows. SATA SSDs has none of them.

• A SAS drive needs its own controller and does not seat on a SATA port.
• A U.2 or U.3 drive looks like a 2.5-inch SSD and has a different plug. The 2.5-inch form factor alone proves nothing, so read the interface too.
• EDSFF drives have no socket in an ordinary PC.

A price far under the median describes a fake. A large SSD at a small fraction of its own size page is more likely a controller that lies about its flash than a bargain, and a quick format proves nothing. The site removes the worst rows at 2 TB and up, but a fake priced just over that floor still lists. Compare a row with the median of its own filtered set, be wary of a drive with no maker’s part number, and test what arrives with h2testw while you can still return it.

A title is not a spec sheet. Only 37 percent of the M.2 NVMe rows above stated a generation. A title rarely says DRAM or NAND type. Look up the part number on the maker’s page and read that. You will also meet OEM drives pulled from laptops. Samsung’s tools page warns that features “may vary” on Samsung OEM drives, so a bundled clone tool may not count one.

Used SSDs: what to check

A used SSD can be a fair buy, because the wear is written down inside it and you can read it. At 1 TB a used M.2 NVMe drive had a median of $140 against $249 new on November 1, 2026. Buying used drives on eBay and SSD endurance own the detail. In short, ask for a CrystalDiskInfo report before you pay, though a refusal proves nothing by itself. Read Total Host Writes and divide by the rating: 30 TB written on a 1 TB drive rated 600 TBW is 5 percent of it, and hours say little, because an SSD is worn by writing. On arrival connect it directly, because a USB adapter can hide SMART, and write the whole drive once inside the return window, which also proves its capacity.

Do not count on a used drive for a bundled clone license or for a warranty. Sandisk ties its Acronis offer to redeeming within 90 days of purchase, and a warranty ends at its years or its TBW, “whichever comes first” in Samsung’s words.

Four worked examples, each read from the maker

An old ThinkPad T440p with a hard drive. The sheet gives a SATA 6.0 Gb/s bay, 2.5 inches wide, with SSDs at 7 mm. If Get-PhysicalDisk reads HDD, the buy is a 2.5-inch SATA SSD at 7 mm or under, such as the 6.8 mm 870 EVO class, in 512 GB or 1 TB, with a USB-to-SATA adapter for the clone. It has an M.2 option, but “exclusive with WWAN card” and from a generation whose wiring you would want to confirm, so the bay is the simple route. The site’s new medians ran from about $135 at 512 GB to $241 at 1 TB.

A ThinkPad E14 Gen 6 (Intel) that needs room. The sheet lists one 2242 and one 2280 slot, both PCIe 4.0 x4, and says Lenovo offers one SSD “with a second slot for user self-expansion”. So nothing needs cloning. The sheet’s one listed offering is a 2242 drive, which makes the 2280 the likely free slot, but look at the machine in hand before you buy. Then it is a Gen4 TLC NVMe drive of that length, up to the 1 TB the sheet lists as tested. On November 1, 2026 a 2242 cost far more, so the free slot’s length matters to your budget. In Disk Management, initialize the new drive and make a New Simple Volume, and Windows sees it.

A handheld: ROG Ally, Ally X or Legion Go. ASUS lists 2230 for the Ally (2023) and 2280 for the Ally X, and Lenovo lists 2242 for the Legion Go. A Gen4 2230 like the 7100M class is also among the cooler drives on the table above. Lenovo’s “up to 1TB” is what it tested, per its note, so a larger drive is at your own risk.

A desktop on an ASUS PRIME B550-PLUS with a Ryzen 5000. The spec page gives the first M.2 slot SATA and PCIe 4.0 x4, and the second SATA and PCIe 3.0 x4. So the Gen4 drive goes in the first slot. ASUS lists that slot at PCIe 3.0 with a Ryzen 4000 G-Series, so check the processor too. Adding a drive in the second slot disables SATA6G_56, so if a hard drive is on one of those ports, move it first.