The SSD upgrade: still magic. No longer £40.

Step zero: check you don't already have one

Plenty of people are sitting on an SSD without knowing it. Thirty seconds: press Start, type "defrag", open Defragment and Optimise Drives, and read the "Media type" column. "Solid state drive" — you're done, this upgrade isn't for you (and your PC feeling slow has another cause — often too little RAM or too many startup programs). "Hard disk drive" — keep reading, because you're in for a treat.

What happened to prices, and where they are now

Short version: the AI industry is buying memory chips faster than anyone can make them, and the manufacturers would rather sell to datacentres than to you. Since late 2025, consumer SSD prices have roughly doubled; the industry doesn't expect real relief before 2028. Concretely, as of August 2026:

• A reputable-brand 500GB SATA SSD: roughly £85–£115 ($60–90)
• A reputable-brand 1TB: roughly £135 ($120–200 depending on brand and week)
• Some famous models have gone silly — Samsung's popular 870 EVO 1TB, once a £45 no-brainer, has been spotted north of $300. Don't pay that; the budget lines do this job fine.

Two pieces of market news worth knowing before you shop. First, Micron is shutting down its Crucial consumer brand — for years the default recommendation — so Crucial drives on shelves are the last of the stock (fine to buy if the price is right; warranties are being honoured, but don't expect their support tools to stick around). Second, because prices move monthly right now, check the price the day you buy, and if you spot old stock near old prices, take it.

Choosing the drive (2026 edition)

Any 2.5" SATA SSD from a name brand does the job — this is a solved product category. But here's the 2026-specific tip that saves you money and grief: buy the brand whose free cloning software you want, because the era of good free third-party cloning tools is mostly over:

• WD or SanDisk drive → free licensed copy of Acronis's cloning tool, which handles everything below automatically. The path of least resistance.
• Samsung drive → Samsung Magician includes their (Samsung-drives-only) migration tool. Equally painless.
• Any other brand → use Hasleo Backup Suite Free — genuinely free, runs inside Windows, and is what the community adopted after Macrium Reflect Free (the old standard answer, still recommended by a thousand stale guides) was discontinued.

Sizing rule, stated plainly: everything currently used on your old drive must fit on the new one. Check "used space" in File Explorer → This PC. Going from a half-empty 1TB hard drive to a 500GB SSD is normal and fine — the vendor tools above shrink things to fit automatically. (The free Linux-boot alternatives like Rescuezilla are good tools, but they punish smaller-target clones with extra steps — stick with the Windows tools for this job.)

The clone and the swap

1. Get a USB-to-SATA adapter (~£10 — the one purchase people forget). Plug the new SSD into it, plug it into the PC.
2. Run your cloning tool (per your brand, above), choose old drive → new drive, and let it copy. It'll shrink partitions to fit if needed. An evening's coffee-length wait for most drives.
3. The swap — laptops: most 2012–2018 laptops take a 2.5" drive behind a bottom panel and a few screws. But "most" isn't "all" — some want the entire bottom cover off. Search YouTube for "[your exact model] hard drive replacement" before you unscrew anything; if the video shows major surgery, a repair shop will do the swap cheaply with your already-cloned drive.
4. The swap — desktops: even easier; the only nuance is the SSD wants a 2.5"-to-3.5" bracket (a few pounds) to sit in the old drive's bay properly.
5. Boot up. It should simply start — faster than you've seen that machine start in years. Windows handles SSD housekeeping (TRIM) automatically these days; if you enjoy certainty, run fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify in Command Prompt — a 0 means all's well.

One honest aside, because you'll see it argued about: clone vs fresh install. If your Windows currently runs fine, clone — the end result is exactly as fast and saves hours of reinstalling everything. A fresh install only wins if the old install is genuinely bloated or broken. Don't let anyone talk you into the long way round for purity's sake.

And RAM? The companion upgrade has a 2026 asterisk

The traditional advice — "while you're in there, bump 4GB to 8GB" — took the same shortage even harder: laptop memory prices have more than doubled, and older DDR3 sticks are getting scarce as production winds down. The honest 2026 ranking: the SSD is the upgrade; RAM is now a luxury add-on. Exception: if you're on 4GB, more memory still genuinely helps — check Task Manager → Performance → Memory for "Slots used: 1 of 2" (a free slot = cheaper upgrade), and consider secondhand sticks, which are plentiful and low-risk for DDR3-era machines.