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

upgrading or adding more storage to your pc is pretty easy once you know what you need to do to do it you of course can't be afraid to take these side panels off your computer though because you can't upgrade or add additional storage to your computer without doing it to upgrade the storage in your pc you're first going to need to buy a new hard drive or ssd and if you're adding a sata hard drive or sata ssd you'll need to purchase a sata cable as well assuming you don't have any spare ones laying around of course don't worry they're pretty inexpensive in this video i'll be demonstrating how to install a 3.5 inch hard drive as well as a 2.5 inch sata ssd and an m.2 nvme ssd in this tutorial i'll be treating it as if you're adding more storage to your computer if you're wanting to upgrade your os drive to an ssd meaning you want to copy windows from your old slow hard drive to your new fast ssd the next video i've got on my schedule will show how to do that and i'll link it in the cards right up over here as well as in the video description once i finish it your computer of course needs to be turned off and unplugged from power and uh before we go touching anything inside our computer i better be responsible and let you know it is possible for you to damage components in your pc due to an electrostatic discharge or esd there are some pc nazis out there that will tell you you should never touch anything in your computer unless you're wearing an anti-static wrist strap like this one connected to a grounding rod of some kind or at the very least connected to your computer case while these wrist straps aren't incredibly expensive and are readily available to buy online i recognize that the vast majority of you watching this are never going to buy one so i'm just going to let you guys know that all you really need to do to equalize the static charge between you and your pc components is to touch a metal portion of your pc case like this just make sure to do this once every few minutes and you'll be just fine i've used this technique while building every computer i've ever built and in 15 years of pc building i've killed a grand total of zero pc components if you don't believe me then i invite you to check out the playlist i'm putting in the cards right now of videos from jay's two cents who is a much bigger and very well respected tech youtuber who just so happens to be very knowledgeable about this subject okay uh for our first demonstration i'm going to show how to install an m.2 ssd these little guys are the newest forms of storage on the market and are by far the simplest to install you're going to need a motherboard that has an m.2 slot on it and a small screwdriver to install one however oh one more thing you need to be aware of is your m.2 slot may be under your graphics card so you may have to remove it to install your m.2 drive if you're not sure how to remove your graphics card i'm placing a link in the cards right now to a video i made about upgrading your graphics card just skip on ahead to the 2 minute and 50 second mark in that video to see how to remove your graphics card the motherboard i'm using in this video has a heatsink plate here that is secured by two screws and that covers the m.2 slot so i have to unscrew those and remove this plate first now take notice of these three metal nut looking things here these are for a little metal standoff to screw into which then sets the back end of your m.2 drive to the correct height to secure it into place there are different lengths of m.2 drives which is why there are several different positions for standoffs to be placed my motherboard came with several standoffs and securing screws in a little baggie for those of you doing this with a pre-built pc i hope your computer came with this stuff somewhere or it's already installed onto your motherboard if it is already installed be aware you may need to move it depending on the length of your m.2 ssd as for me i had to put the standoff into this spot here to accommodate my drive and once that was done i just inserted the fingers of the drive into the slot at a bit of an angle kind of like this and once it's fully inserted you lower the back of the drive down onto the standoff and then secure it in place with the screw if your motherboard has a heat sink for the m.2 slot like mine does you'll want to remove this plastic film from the thermal pad here and then secure the heat sink back into place now before we can use our drive and save stuff onto it we're going to need to boot into windows and initialize it so let's show you how to do that now the initialization process is the same for all types of storage drives so i'm only going to show how to do this just this one time if you're watching this to learn how to install a three and a half inch hard drive or a two and a half inch sata ssd you'll just have to jump back to this portion of the video after watching the portion about the type of drive you're installing okay from your desktop you're going to right click on the windows icon here at the bottom left of the screen and then select disk management from the menu that pops up here it may take a little bit to load up but once it does you should get a prompt to initialize your new disk click ok and you're ready for the next step if for some reason you do not get this prompt then you'll see something that looks like this a list of all the drives connected to your computer the one we just installed is this one right here that says unallocated before we can format the drive and use it we need to initialize it so right click on this portion of the window here for me it says disk one depending on how many drives you have in your system it may say disk two or three or whatever click on initialize disk and then click ok now we're ready to format the drive right click anywhere on this area here that says unallocated and you'll get a menu like this select new simple volume to start the new simple volume wizard click next and then click next again at this window you can select the drive letter you want for this new drive by just clicking the drop down over here i'm just going to leave it with the one it initially suggested and click next again at this screen it wants to know how we want to format our drive i always just leave everything on the defaults here but if you'd like to give your drive a name you can do that if you'd like on the next screen it will give us a recap of everything we've chosen to do if you want to go back and change something you can click back and go change it but once you're ready to finish all this you just click finish and it will format the drive and once it's done your drive will now be recognized in windows explorer and ready to use all right now let's take a look at how to install a two and a half inch hard drive or ssd to get our drive working we've got four things we need to do first up we need to mount the drive into our case there's a lot of different systems that have been developed for this so depending on your case this is going to work very differently for you than what i'm showing here i'm using a fractal design meshfy c case and for two and a half inch drives they have this plate that you screw your drives onto some cases have rails you have to screw your drives onto and others have drive sleds that your drives just clip into and don't use any screws at all so once you secure your drive in place we can move on to connecting the sata cable this is the cable i talked about at the beginning of the video you may need to purchase if you don't have any spares laying around this is the cable that carries the data stored on our drive to the motherboard where it can then be loaded into system ram to be worked with by your cpu sata cables have this nice little l-shaped connector so it can only be connected one direction so you can't mess this up you'll need to connect the other end of the cable to a sata port on your motherboard which will look like these guys here the third thing we need to do is connect power to our drive which is what this larger l-shape thing is here on our drive your computer's power supply should have a bunch of different wires coming off of it and you should have at least one that has several connectors on it that look like this these are called sata power connectors as i'm sure you've guessed we connect one of these onto the sata power port on our drive and now we're ready to boot up our pc and perform the fourth step which is drive initialization if you've been watching this video from the beginning you know i just talked about how to do this before showing how to install this drive so go ahead and jump back to that follow the steps and you'll be good to go now for our third and final drive install for this video we have the old faithful three and a half inch hard drive this process is pretty much identical to the two and a half inch drive i just did so if you watched that one just now this is all going to look very familiar first let's mount the drive in our system again like the two and a half inch drives every case has a different system for mounting drives so you'll have to figure out how to mount a drive in your case as for the fractal design mesh if i see which i'm using in this video it has drive sleds that you screw your hard drive onto and then the sled just clips into the drive cage like so the next step is to connect our sata data cable sata cables have a little l-shape connector and can only be connected one direction so you'll need to plug one end onto your drive and the other end to a sata port on your motherboard next we need to connect power to our drive because without it it ain't gonna work this larger l-shape thing here on our drive is the power connector your computer's power supply will have a bunch of different wires coming from it and amongst them there should be at least one that has several sata power connectors on it which look like this all we need to do now is connect one of these onto the sata power port on our drive and we're ready to boot up our pc and initialize the drive if you've been watching this video from the beginning you've already seen how to do this but if you skipped ahead to see specifically how to install a three and a half inch drive uh you'll now need to go back to the time stamp i'm showing on screen right now and initialize your new drive you need to initialize and format the drive before it will show up in windows explorer and before you'll be able to save anything onto it okay there we go that is it for this video like i mentioned at the beginning if you're wanting to copy windows and all your files from your old drive to your new one then you're going to want to check out my upcoming video on how to clone your os drive for now i'm going to head on out thanks so much for watching before you take off please do all the youtube stuff like comment share and subscribe to the channel and if you're interested in purchasing any of the components i featured in this video like the fractal design mesh if i see or any of the drives i used there's a link to my amazon store in the video description where you can pick all of those things up as well as all kinds of other stuff i've featured in past videos i hope you have a great day and i look forward to seeing you in another video real soon [Music] later [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Maraksot78

Views: 574,637

Keywords: tutorial, how to, upgrade, install, ssd, SSD, m.2 drive, m.2 ssd, M.2 SSD, solid state drive, Solid State Drive, HDD, hdd, hard drive, mechanical hard drive, hard disk, solid state disk, m.2 disk, NVME, nvme, 2280 m.2 nvme ssd, 2260 m.2 ssd, 2242 m.2 drive, storage, increase storage, add storage, add hard drive, add ssd, initialize disk, format disk, format drive, initialize drive

Id: PRuOuv-fT7g

Length: 13min 49sec (829 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020