Upgrade of harddrive in a Aspire Ultrabook

MarioP

I have Aspire M3 581t with HDD 500 Gb and a 20 Gb mSATA SSD (found that that was used only for extra cache).  Could I replace the mSATA SSD with a larger one and then move the OS and other programs to that one and keep the HDD as for storage of files only ? Anybody knows ?

brummyfan2

Hi,
Yes, I guess you can upgrade mSATA drive up to 256GB but I have no experience with mSATA drives. Please read another member's post in the link below but it was a long time ago, so it's up to you to try a smaller mSATA SSD (128GB). I would suggest you to backup important data before trying with the upgrade, so that you can go back to the original setup if you find any difficulty in upgrading.
http://www.userbenchmark.com/System/Acer-Aspire-M3-581T/4179
https://www.drivesolutions.com/cgi/shop/ug2store.cgi?command=listitems&kind=acl&pos=0&type=itemid&itemid=acl908
https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/263760/upgrade-20-gig-on-m3-581tg-is-it-possible

wis

Two great (& free) tools for this project:

1) Macrium Windows PE Recovery Media, which will allow you to create a system image to backup the hard disk drive & to drag & drop Windows 10 into the solid state drive. I remembered when I installed a new hard drive, it was necessary to format it first, which can be done with Macrium. This Macrium Forum discussion suggests that it's not necessary. It does make a good point of externalizing the hard disk drive to avoid rebooting to gain access to it.  There are some other tips as well.
2) Minitool, which will recover data from a damaged partition (free trial version only), migrate OS to SSD & provide recovery. I've only used the Partition Wizard & it's worked well over the years.