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I have in my hands an old Samsung NP300E7A-S01IT laptop that needs a hard drive upgrade since it became desperately slow with age.

What I want to do is upgrade its 10 years old SATA HDD into a SATA SSD.

As per my previous question, what I already tried was buy a Samsung SSD 870 Evo, clone it and plug it in; which did not work.

On the Crucial advisor tool it is shown that the product line supports SSDs, while on the Samsung SSD finder tool it is shown that the 860 Evo might be compatible, but I would like some confirmation before buying more hardware.

Is there a way to install any SSD onto this laptop at all?

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    2.5" SATA III SSDs should be compatible with a device that supports 2.5" HDDs. There is no reason to believe it wouldn't work.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Jan 9, 2023 at 23:31
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    what version of Windows. I performed exactly the same upgrades years ago on half a dozen Windows 7/8/10 desktops and laptops with one issue, when I tried to mess around with partitions. If all I did was clone, it worked just fine
    – Jaromanda X
    Commented Jan 9, 2023 at 23:50
  • @JaromandaX It's running Windows 10 and before that it was a Win 7 laptop.
    – FBeno
    Commented Jan 12, 2023 at 17:53
  • What exactly happened after you cloned the 870 and plugged it in? The exact error? You might need to poke around in the BIOS depending on the error.
    – cybernard
    Commented Jan 12, 2023 at 17:55
  • @cybernard Nothing happened. I plugged the SSD into the SATA port and the BIOS would't even see it. Imagine the BIOS bootable device list with only the CD drive and all the other device empty, as if there was nothing plugged. Furthermore the main page listed the SATA port ad empty/not connected.
    – FBeno
    Commented Jan 12, 2023 at 18:09

1 Answer 1

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You have to re-install Windows when doing this, you are changing the hardware. The previous version of Windows was set up and installed on an HDD and was configured with those drivers.

Cloning the HDD to the SSD and then booting up, Windows does not know about the hardware changes/drivers needed.

Doing a clean install of Windows should fix your issue. You'll just have to copy over the data from the old driver by either uploading to the cloud, backup to an external storage device, or getting the needed equipment to attach the old HDD normally by HDD to USB adapter.

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    I've NEVER had an issue replacing a SATA hdd with a SATA ssd in windows 7 or later since a SATA drive is a SATA drive regardless of the physical nature of the data storage.
    – Jaromanda X
    Commented Jan 9, 2023 at 23:47
  • I had a Dell Latitude D-830 from 2007 with an 80 GB spinning HDD and I replaced it with a 120 GB Sandisk SATA SSD and restored a Macrium Reflect image to that. Worked totally fine straight away.
    – Michael Harvey
    Commented Jan 10, 2023 at 14:19

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