Help with laptop upgrade

[Astral Avenger]

Good news everybody! It's not another 'help me pick/build a new computer' thread! This is even better; a 'help me upgrade my laptop' thread instead.

I have a Dell Inspiron 7352, it's generally a good enough computer for my needs, however the load time on many of my commonly used programs and games is quite slow. I'm hoping to upgrade from my current 1TB HDD to a 1TB SSD, but wanted to run it by the collective wisdom of the playground before buying anything since I've never done a hard drive replacement before.

I'm currently looking at either the Silicon Power A55 1 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive (PC Part Picker link) or TCSunBow X3 1 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive (PC Part Picker ink). Are there any big red flags for either of those or something way better I should be going with? Budget is a concern, $120 USD is the upper limit.

Other related question:
Any advice on cloning the existing hard drive onto the new one or pitfalls to avoid?

Thanks in advance!

Daily use:
Web browsing
Programming in R/Python
Light duty gaming (KSP, Path of Exile, the old Star Wars: Battle Front II, Civ 5)

Dell support page for Inspiron 7352

Spoiler: System Specs

Show

1TB HDD Toshiba MQ02ABF100
2.4GHz Intel i7-5500 Quad-Core
8GB RAM

[snowblizz]

Actually it's not better, it's far far worse. Laptops are temperamental beasts to deal with at best of times.

Never heard the name of either of those SSD manufacturers before which, IMNSHO is a red flag right there. Admittedly there are very few actual SSD factories so almsot every brand is a rebranded device.

If you can swing it I'd get a Samsung 860 QVO/EVO (not entirely sure the difference) but I also own a Crucial SSD so the Crucial BX/MX500 (again unsure on diff) is the cheapest on the list I'd personally trust. Think my Crucial is an MX but several years older and only 512gb.


Do you know what you do however? It's not trivial to port over from a HDD to an SSD, because something in the different architectures means it's not a straight up clone on something that is being used as a bootdisk (don't quote me on it but it might well be going to need to reinstall windows from ground up). Also I've found laptops can be finicky with where they boot off, depending on. I had one that shipped with a nontraditional ECC chip as hardrive and it would not boot up automatically to the new drive because it was, some sort of hardwired to not to. It was a cheapo laptop at work so eventually I decided wasn't worth my time figureing it out.

Alternatively, it may turn out to be easy, but you never really know in advance.

If you got a local computer fixer it may well be worth it to get someone else to do it.

[factotum]

I'm pretty sure that there's loads of software available to clone a HDD onto an SSD--some SSD manufacturers (e.g. Samsung) even provide their own tools for the job. There's one really critical problem in this case, though, since you're talking about doing this on a laptop--as a general rule, you need to have the SSD and the original hard drive plugged into the machine at the same time in order to copy one to the other. Most laptops don't have any means of plugging a second hard drive in, which makes it impossible to do that. You could buy an external USB-attached hard drive caddy and install the SSD in that to do the transfer, but that's going to slow the whole process down and make it less likely to work.