How to Change Hard Drive on Lenovo IdeaPad 330?

Lenovo's IdeaPad is a brand of consumer-oriented laptop computers that it designed, developed, and marketed. In January 2008, the IdeaPad laptops were launched, signaling a shift away from the business-oriented ThinkPad computers and toward a more consumer-oriented design and feel. The keyboard featured a "distinctive ThinkPad feel," according to Notebook Review, and "the touchpad and touchpad buttons were smooth and quick."

The Lenovo IdeaPad 330 series was a line of home and business computers. The IdeaPad 330 series consists of 14-inch, 15-inch, and 17-inch laptop computers.

Why do users change hard drive on Lenovo IdeaPad 330 laptops?

Lenovo IdeaPad 330 series has been renounced for several years, but it doesn’t mean it can retire now. It’s a common issue if you see the low disk space warning on your Lenovo IdeaPad 330 computer, after all, you’ve stored many data files on its disk.

Normally, many users will choose to change hard drive on Lenovo IdeaPad 330 computer with a larger hard drive for more storage space. But since SSD is more affordable and has much better performance than HDD, more and more users would like to do a Lenovo IdeaPad 330 SSD upgrade for a better experience on their PC.

Another situation is the original hard drive is corrupted for some reason, the user needs a new hard drive or directly uses SSD as the replacement.

No matter what makes you wish to change hard drive on Lenovo IdeaPad laptop, if you don’t know how to securely do this job, don’t worry, you can follow the steps of this post. In the next part, you can learn all details.

How to replace HDD from Lenovo IdeaPad 330?

In this part, we’ll introduce how to pick a suitable hard drive, an SSD, the tools you may need for the work, and how to move your Windows system from the original disk to the new disk without reinstalling the system.

Section 1. Pick a nice disk for your Lenovo IdeaPad 330

Here we focus on how to select a suitable SSD. For users who wish to upgrade the HDD to SSD, the suitable drive interface is SATA, and the drive form factor is 2.5”. So you just need to find the SSD that matches these two conditions.

On the official web of Crucial, the Crucial MX500 NAND SATA 2.5-inch SSDs are all available.

Other SSDs like Kingston KC600 2.5-inch and Samsung 870 EVO 2.5-inch SSD are also optional.

Section 2. Use a reliable tool to clone HDD to the new disk

After you prepare your SSD, you can use an SSD USB adapter to connect your new disk to your Lenovo IdeaPad 330. HDD can directly use a wire to connect.

To securely transfer all things from HDD to a new disk, reliable cloning software is necessary. You can’t just copy and paste them to another disk, the system won’t boot normally. Clone is not difficult if you choose a suitable tool. Here, we recommend you to AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional.

It is a disk and partition management tool for Windows 11/10/8/8.1/7/XP system. The “Disk Clone Wizard” function can help you clone a disk to another without reinstalling the Windows system and all programs. All personal settings are the exactly same as the original disk.

During the procedure, the program will align SSD partitions to optimize SSD performance further, you can resize the SSD partition.

Now let’s start to clone the original HDD to the new disk.

Note: A new disk needs to be initialized before all other operations.

Step 1. Install AOMEI Partition Assistant. In the main interface of AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, please click "Clone" in the main interface, and select "Clone Disk".

Step 2. Choose the Windows system drive as the source disk and click "Next".

Step 3. Select the SSD drive as the destination disk, and then click "Next".

Step 4. Then, you can check the source and destination disk in the next window or change to "Sector to Sector clone", and click the "Confirm" button to continue if there is no problem.

Here, you can also click the "Settings" button to adjust the partition size on the destination disk or tick "4k alignment" to improve the reading and writing speed of the SSD. 

Tip: If you regret the partition size you set in this part, you can use the “Allocate Free Space”, or the “Resize/Move Partition" function to adjust again.

Step 6. Click “Finish” and then click “Apply” to execute the pending operation.

Tip: You can also keep only the Windows system and the files system needed and use this computer as a new PC. 

Section 3. Install new disk on Lenovo IdeaPad 330

Until now, your SSD is a bootable disk. The last part is to install it on your computer. You’ll need a screwdriver to open the bottom cover of your laptop.

Step 1. Remove all screws on the bottom case.

Step 2. Use a plastic pry tool to open the device by sliding it gently around the laptop

Step 3. Gently and carefully use a small flathead screwdriver underneath the rubber edge to try and pry it up.

Step 4. Take the hard drive out from the caddy. Put the SSD in it.

Step 5. Reseat the SSD back to the drive bay.

Note: If you also want to change RAM, Lenovo IdeaPad 330 requires DDR4 memory. You can search your processor type to find a suitable RAM to replace the old one.

Boot your PC from the new disk

After you install all back, you can boot your computer. You need to change the boot order in the BIOS menu to boot Windows from SSD.

Step 1. Restart the computer and constantly press the F2 key (or other keys like Del, F8, and F12) to access the BIOS menu.

Step 2. Use the arrow key to select the Boot tab. System devices will appear in order of priority.

Step 3. To give the cloned SSD a boot priority over other hard drives, move it to the first position in the list.

Step 4. Save the changes and exit the BIOS setup utility. The computer will restart from the SSD successfully.

Bottom lines

To change hard drive on Lenovo Ideapad 330, this post has made a clear presentation. Hope you can successfully replace the old disk to enjoy your new disk. And you can wipe your old hard drive to reuse it as a storage disk.

AOMEI Partition Assistant is a practical tool, besides cloning the whole disk, this tool also allows users to convert a disk to MBR/GPT without deleting partitions, move large folders and the installed programs to another disk/drive without reinstalling, etc.

What’s more, it has the Server Edition for Windows Server 2022/2019/2016/2012(R2)/2008(R2)/2003 users to conveniently manage their Server computers.