When it's time to upgrade your SSD, you're probably focusing on the read/write speed, PCIe generation, capacity, and other SSD specs you should really care about. However, there are many other aspects that need your attention, especially if you're doing this for the first time.

Whether you're using a laptop or desktop, you'll need to put some thought into the SSD slot you'll use, whether to clone your OS or not, and the BIOS/UEFI settings you'll need to change. If all goes well, you'll get your fancy new Gen4 or Gen5 SSD set up in no time. If you face any weird problems, however, this list might help you identify if you did something wrong.

5 Will you keep using your old SSD?

Is it time to part ways or is co-existence possible?

Unless your old SSD is terribly slow compared to your new one, or riddled with bad sectors, you might be planning on retaining it. If your old SSD is a 2.5" SATA drive, you might not have to worry about accommodating both drives, since the new one is probably going to be an M.2 NVMe SSD occupying its separate M.2 slot on the motherboard. On the other hand, if your old SSD is an M.2 drive, you'd need to have at least two M.2 slots on your motherboard to retain both.

If your laptop does not have more than one M.2 slot, you'll have to decide what to do with your old SSD. It's recommended to copy all of your important data to your new SSD (if it is large enough) or to an external drive before you install your new SSD.

Desktop users will, more often than not, have at least two M.2 slots on the motherboard, even if it's a micro-ATX board. The only decision you need to make is which M.2 slot is the best for which drive. I'm assuming your new SSD will belong to a newer PCIe generation compared to your older drive. Then it makes sense to use the fastest slot on your motherboard for the newer drive, and use the old SSD on a secondary or tertiary slot (if available).

If the new SSD has no performance advantage over your older drive, you can leave the older one in the primary M.2 slot (where it's likely to already be), and install the new drive in the secondary slot.

4 Initialize the new SSD the right way

Initialize, partition, and configure

This might sound basic to many users, but is often overlooked by some when installing a new SSD. Disk Management is a Windows utility that allows you to monitor your drives, format them, resize partitions, and initialize new drives.

That last part is important when you are working with a new SSD. Often, you need to initialize a new drive before it can be detected by Windows or in your computer's BIOS/UEFI. The process is quick and takes just a few clicks, but if you forget about it or aren't aware of it, you would wrongly assume that your new SSD is faulty or there is something wrong with your motherboard.

Another rare but very real problem is that many computers will fail to boot from SSDs larger than 2TB. This is a limitation of the MBR partitioning scheme that many computers use. If you want to use an SSD greater than 2TB as a boot drive, initialize it using the GPT partitioning scheme in Disk Management. You also need to ensure you're using UEFI instead of BIOS, as BIOS doesn't support GPT drives as boot drives. If jumping from BIOS to UEFI is too much of a hassle, you might consider buying a 1TB drive as your boot drive.

3 You might need an external enclosure for the upgrade

Laptop users, listen up

A fresh OS install is always preferred on a new SSD. Ideally, you should disconnect the old SSD, so that the bootloader is created only on the new drive, and no unnecessary file leakage happens to the old one. However, if you want to have an exact copy of your existing OS on your new SSD, you can clone your OS to the new drive. Laptop users with a single M.2 slot will need an external enclosure to connect the old SSD to the laptop while the new one sits in the laptop's M.2 slot.

You can use programs like Macrium Reflect to clone your OS to the new SSD in a few simple steps. Once the process is complete, you can use the old SSD as secondary storage (on a PC with multiple M.2 slots), or discard it if it's a small-capacity drive or too slow for your current needs.

I would also recommend formatting the older SSD if it was being used as a boot drive. Having a single boot drive is preferable to multiple drives with their own OS installations. From my experience of using two copies of Windows 10 — one on my older SATA SSD and the other one on my newer NVMe SSD — ended up creating weird boot issues, file corruptions, and occasional system instability.

2 Your new SSD might disable your old SATA SSD

That's just how motherboards work

Many motherboard manuals make this clear, but not everyone has time to go through the entire manual, and can end up confused after installing a new M.2 SATA SSD. Your CPU and motherboard chipset communicate with storage drives through PCIe lanes. If you end up installing an M.2 SATA (not NVMe) SSD in the primary M.2 slot, it will disable some SATA slots on your motherboard, as the total available bandwidth is fixed. This will not be a concern if you're installing an M.2 NVMe drive in your primary M.2 slot.

If your old SATA SSD happens to be using one of those disabled SATA ports, you'd be left wondering why it's not being detected by your computer anymore. The fix is simple — you swap the SATA slots for your old SSD, and it will be successfully detected by the BIOS/UEFI and your operating system.

1 Set the correct boot device priority

This can sometimes cause unnecessary headaches

This is another one of those obvious things, but might not strike everyone as such. If you are intending to use your new SSD as the new boot device, you sometimes need to explicitly tell your computer to identify it as the primary boot device. This will not be an issue for those who are buying a new drive simply to expand their secondary storage, but most users would want to use their quick new SSD to improve their boot time.

What you need to do is head into the BIOS, access the boot settings, and set your new SSD as the #1 boot device. This configuration is more important if your old SSD still has the older operating system on it. Without the right boot priority, your computer might continue to boot from the old SSD by default. Even if you have wiped your OS from the old SSD and are using it only as secondary storage, making your new SSD the primary boot device will probably save you a few seconds of boot time.

If only upgrades were more seamless

Moving to a larger SSD for more storage space and performance is a great idea, but it does come with some important considerations. If you're intending to use it as a boot device, you need to make sure you're buying the right capacity. Plus, cloning your operating system to the new drive might need an additional SSD enclosure if you only have a single M.2 slot.

Outside of cases like upgrading from an HDD or a tiny, dated SATA SSD, you can benefit from retaining your old SSD. Not only can you use it as secondary storage for games, media, and more, but it can also act as a backup if you encounter issues with your new SSD later.