A Beginners Guide: Upgrade Your PC Storage - How to install M.2 SSD, 2.5" SSD & 3.5" Hard Drive

for some reason I cant pick my new ssd as a primary. and the hdd is like, a phantom, says its still there, and the bios loads from there. I want the bios to load from my ssd... its frustrating.

you just let me realize I had another drive I haven't been using. I had a 1TB free. I have been using a 222 Gb drive for years.

Holy shit thanks so much! So EZ to follow!

Hi I want to replace my M.2 NVME SSD, currently mines at 250gb and im planning to replace it with a 1tb, is there anything to note if i want to switch the ssd e.g. what happens to the old files etc.

Can anyone help me I’ve been struggling for a while and this video is really helpful I just didn’t see a place to put it like in this video

thanks bro

can a 3.5 be installed to a lap top or is the connection under powered due to its meant for a 2.5 drive ?

This helped me to get the disc to work am so happy i can use it ☺️

Omg! 2years later this video is still relevant! Amazing! Thank You!

ESD chance ? think less then 2%.

great vid

I have already upgrade to 256 GB SSD for C Drive OS and 1 TB SSD for my games, music and movie in D Drive for my home MSI gaming pc.
I have also upgrade to Windows 11 Pro 22H2 for my home MSI gaming pc and Windows 11 Home 22H2 for my office ROG gaming pc.

does the ssd come with the screw or was that supposed to be in the prebuilt PCs spare parts?

"How to upgrade your pc storage"
-You have to figure it out alone wow it helped a lot tysm useless...

Mine doesn’t give me the option to initialize it

Bad video

On a laptop that doesn’t have a top heat sink do I install the thermal pad on the bottom of the m.2 ssd? It seems that’s how it is on my primary m.2

Have no experience .... hardest part of changing out my Lap Top's 500gig SSD with my new 1TB SSD was 1 single screw from HELL that held down my original SSD ... after 2 hours of going thru different screwdrivers I finally got that tiny screw removed .... mostly stripped.


Used an external encasement for new m.2 , used EASUS to Clone my original hard drive to the new.... installed new. Booted right up no problem.

Could anybody tell me if i can install m.2 ssd without taking my motherboard out? Im too lazy to take parts apart from my pc. Thanks.

Thank you for the vid :) was just wondering, if my OS is installed on my SSD, is it safe to remove it and then put it back in? It wont reset or anything?

Im sending my pc in for repair and my boss says i need to remove the drives first.

this will be a life saver my dad did my pc with some help from me but it has 237 i needed like 1tera bite as i cant play sniper elite anymore just hoping i wont loose anything

To those that were panicking, just like me, you might need to scroll down to find the uninitialized Drive

Do I have screw it down or can it just be placed like that??

I once formatted my d drive on my laptop… that was painful

Your tutorial was extremely helpful. Thank you.

Straight to the point! well done!

Thank you so much! Finally upgrading to a 1TB ssd, this video helped so much!

My drive isn’t showing up during the prompt or in the unallocated section, doesn’t show up when I rescan the disk either, any suggestions?

Is Formatting the drive needed? Can you take a SSD or SATA Hot swap drive from a windows 10 system and use it without formatting the drive in a Windows 11 system? How do you save/transfer Data so it can be used in a new computer? None of the data I'm talking about is operating system data. Hopefully someone can help me answer these questions.

HELP!!!, So my case has 3 Hot Swappable Bays with three different SATA drives. I have been using these drives without issue in Windows 10 for 3 years now. Well I recently had a problem with my system that drove me to update My Motherboard and GPU as well Installing Windows 11 on a new M.2 Samsung 980 pro that is complete installed.

When I did this WIN 11 install I removed the three HOT SWAP Bays with the Drives i was using for backups/Games and Files I wish to keep, so I do not want them to be FORMATTED OR ERASED. When I returned them in their Bays and rebooted my system they did not show up. I'm overly frustrated and not sure what I can do to return my drives and the Data not being lost. The Drives range from 4TB/2TB and 2TB bay drives.

I hope a smart person can help out this Dumb old man. I would be most very relieved if someone can help me with this.

saw ur video on ram and it was so helpful i only trust you now. so i looked you up specifically for the next step in my pc upgrading journey. thank you so much for this.

I am stuck in a bios if I click save and exit it dont work it is again a asus bios.Ido not know what to do, help plisss😢

Ive encountered a problem with the NVME drive. When i plug it in and try and use it. It chooses to boot that over my original hard drive which the new one has nothing on it. Going into bios nothing i do fixes this when prioritizing different boot options. I then tried plugging it in while the computer is on as it opened windows and it doesn’t recognize the drive. I dont know what the problem is. I have an ssd drive and i want to add the nvme which is the first of its kind in my pc.

Wow thank you so much!, after looking thru so many videos. Yours is the one that actually helped me.. thank you

can I have a 1tb M.2 and 512gb 2.5 ssd?
will it work?

I bought a brand new 3 tb hard drive and put it in my pc but when i turn on my pc it wont go into windows it says no hard drive detected what should i do

Do m.2 drives need a heat sink?

I ordered a 8TB SSD and will watch this again to install it.

So I managed to get to the end and made the storage accessable but it has 2 different storage areas 1 with 2 tb and the other with 5 and I can make a new simple volume for the 5 tb one

Question, if I install a bigger m2, will i lose all my data from the one i remove?

Thank you very much I just got a brand new gaming pc and had to buy a new hard drive to install more space to it since it came with only 500gb space...this video was very informative simple and straightforward

Newer games want ssd just got a new gaming desktop and wish I had known I have 2 hdd drive can I just add a ssd if I have a third slot will my game and steam recognize it and work

what will happen to all my data on my computer if i install a new ssd?

Hello sir your video is so easy to understand and im even not thay knowledgable at pc. Thank you.

This guy talks like he’s completely confused what he’s talking about the entire time but at the same time, knows exactly what he’s doing. But thanks for info. It worked for me.

elvis tone, thank you thank you very much

I know how to install just don’t know how to transfer files from old one to new with only one m.2 ssd slot on my motherboard.

Thanks for this. I’m 2TB expanded thanks to you.