Upgrading Asus N61JQ - Hard Disk

Hello guys!
I'm planning to upgrade my HardDisk, i'm suspecting its gonna fail soon because i'm a very heavy user, almost 16hours on every day for coding and etc.

The busy light is appearing more frequently and small freezes are happening even when opening Microsoft Word.

I personally have a 600gb sized harddisk inside my harddisk. I'm planning to get a solid state drive because i need speed when i comes to loading and switching(alt tab) due to studies(Visual studio), hate waiting for 2-3 sec to open a "Form" in visual studio.

1)May i know if the cause of those longer waiting time(loading) is caused by my harddisk?

2) I doubt there's an empty slot for me to add another hard disk so will it be possible if i could just load my OS and important programs in solid state using my USB 2.0 port during start up so i can use the 600gb for just data storage.

If you were me , how would u go about modifying this laptop?

I personally find the i7 good enough as it doesn't even hit 25% when i'm using it heavily. & graphic is enough for me(1gb dedicated) so its left with the hard disk? Unless there are other factors that affect the loading speed of programs.

** would be nice if you can list how i can do about your suggestion & cost
With regards,
Jonathan

 

The first thing you should check is the health of your HDD. You can use Crystal Disk Info for a quick check, this will also give you the rotation speed and manufacturer of your HDD. Once you know who the manufacturer, you cna hop on their website and download their health monitoring tool like Seatools for Seagate drives. Run the tests and check what they return. This will rule out a faulty drive.

That being said, it is very likely that you have a 5400RPM drive in there which would be a likely cause for those stutters in which case a SSD would surely help.

Once you install the SSD and do a clean install or OS migration, you can purchase an enclosure for the HDD so you can use it as an external drive to hold your data.