My apologies if this topic has been beaten to death and I missed things in my searches on this site.
I need to replace hard drives in my sisters and my HP laptop computers. I have WD 1TB Blacks in my shopping cart but, my searching on the “error’net” gave me so much conflicting information I’m a bit confused. My laptop drive is just plain slow and her laptop has some other issue which is causing a huge amount of thrashing (plenty of free space and it has been ‘optimized’). Both are older laptops so, a HD upgrade seems appropriate.
Do I need to buy a USB based external enclosure to mirror the boot drive into the new hard drive?
Will this work: Software and Firmware Downloads | WD Support
Or, do I need to spend more money than I pay buying the hard drive to get a piece of software that will copy the MBR and all info to the new hard drive?
TIA!