Upgrading Your Laptop Storage Guide: ADATA LEGEND 860 1TB Upgrade and Full System Migration How-To

Doubling Your Laptop Storage: ADATA LEGEND 860 1TB Upgrade and Full System Migration Guide

There is a specific kind of frustration that only laptop owners understand. You bought a good machine. The processor is fine, the screen is fine, the battery is fine. But Windows Update is failing because there is no room to stage the download, your photo library lives permanently on an external drive you keep forgetting at home, and every game you install means uninstalling another one. Nothing is broken. You have simply run out of floor.

We see this pattern constantly in the Philippine market, where the sweet spot for laptop pricing has settled on configurations that pair a genuinely capable processor with a storage drive sized for a spreadsheet and a browser. It is the single easiest thing for a manufacturer to trim, and it is also the single easiest thing for an owner to fix.

This guide covers that fix end to end. We are using the ADATA LEGEND 860 1TB as our upgrade drive and the Lenovo Yoga 7i we previously reviewed as our patient, taking it from its factory 512GB drive to a full terabyte. We will walk through when an upgrade is actually warranted, how the physical swap works, and how to move your entire Windows installation across without reinstalling anything.

We will also be honest about something most upgrade guides gloss over. Laptops with a single drive slot make this harder than desktops do, and there is no clever software trick that makes the problem disappear. More to the point, the screwdriver work is not what stops people. Plenty of readers who can happily strip a laptop down get stuck at the software step instead, so that is where we have spent most of this guide.

Why the Storage Drive Is Still the Upgrade That Matters Most

Storage is the one component in a modern laptop that you actually wait on. Processors and graphics chips finish their work in fractions of a second. The drive is where the machine goes to fetch something, and if that fetch is slow, everything downstream of it is slow too, regardless of how good the rest of the hardware is.

On a current PCIe Gen4 M.2 drive, that fetch is close to instant. The practical differences you notice day to day:

• Boot and wake times. The gap between pressing the power button and having a usable desktop shrinks to seconds.
• Application launch. Large creative applications and games open without the multi-second hang that a slower or heavily filled drive introduces.
• Game load times. Level loads, fast travel, and asset streaming in open-world titles all pull directly from the drive.
• File operations. Copying a folder of RAW photos or a video project stops being something you walk away from.
• System responsiveness under load. When Windows is updating, an antivirus scan is running, and you are trying to open a browser, the drive is the thing being fought over. More headroom means less contention.

There is a second benefit that has nothing to do with speed. A drive that is nearly full is a drive that performs worse and wears faster. Windows needs working room for its page file, hibernation file, update staging, and temporary files. Once you cross roughly the 75 to 80 percent full mark, you start losing performance simply because the drive has nowhere to work. Doubling capacity is not just about storing more. It is about giving the system room to breathe.

The Drive: ADATA LEGEND 860 1TB

We picked the LEGEND 860 for this upgrade for a straightforward reason. It is an SSD specifically designed for budget-oriented customers, which is exactly the profile of the person doing this upgrade. Nobody swapping the drive in a mid-range ultraportable wants to spend more on the drive than the upgrade is worth, and the LEGEND 860 sits at a price point where the 1TB step up makes obvious sense.

It is a PCIe Gen4 x4 drive in the standard M.2 2280 length, which covers the vast majority of laptops made in the last several years. The heatspreader is a thin label-style unit rather than a tall block, and that matters more on a laptop than anything else on the spec sheet. A drive with a chunky aluminium heatsink physically will not fit under most laptop bottom panels. This one measures 3.13mm tall with the heatspreader attached and 2.15mm without it, so clearance is not a concern.

Performance Recap

We reviewed the LEGEND 860 in full on our desktop test bench, and the short version is that it delivers what it claims. In CrystalDiskMark we recorded 6,366 MB/s sequential read and 4,279 MB/s sequential write, both comfortably clearing the rated figures rather than falling short of them. That is a healthy result and not something we take for granted at this price tier.

Sustained write behaviour is the other number worth knowing. The drive holds its fast write mode for roughly 268GB of continuous writing before speeds drop to a slower steady state. In practical terms, that window is far larger than anything a normal user will hit in one sitting, and it matters directly for this project: restoring a full system image or cloning a half-full 512GB drive fits inside it comfortably.

For laptop users specifically, none of these peak numbers are the point. A thin-and-light machine is not going to sustain a Gen4 drive at full tilt for long anyway, and thermal headroom inside a laptop chassis is limited. What matters is that the drive is quick where you feel it, runs cool enough not to throttle in a confined space, and does not fall over under everyday mixed workloads. On all three counts it does the job.

Our full bench testing, including the gaming trace results and the console compatibility checks for the PS5, all of it is in our original ADATA LEGEND 860 review. This article picks up where that one ends.

How to Tell You Actually Need the Upgrade

Not every slow laptop needs a new drive. Before you order anything, check whether you recognise your machine in this list:

• Free space below 15 percent. Open File Explorer, look at your C: drive. If the bar is red or close to it, this is your answer. Windows genuinely cannot operate well in that condition.
• Windows Update failing or looping. Feature updates need a substantial staging area. When there is no room, updates fail in ways that do not clearly say “you are out of space.”
• You are actively managing what stays installed. If installing something new means uninstalling something else, you have outgrown the drive. This is the most common trigger.
• Permanent external drive dependency. If your working files live on a USB drive because they will not fit internally, you are carrying a bag of compromises around.
• Games that will not fit. Current large titles routinely ask for 100GB or more. Two of those and a 512GB drive is finished.
• The machine was fast and now is not. A drive running near capacity slows down measurably. If nothing else changed and the laptop feels sluggish, check space before you blame the processor.

If none of these describe your situation and you are simply chasing speed, the honest answer is that the upgrade may not be worth it. Moving from one competent Gen4 drive to another competent Gen4 drive is not something you will feel. Moving from a full 512GB drive to a roomy 1TB drive is something you will feel every single day.

Before Anything Else: Ask the Store

We are putting this ahead of everything else in the guide because it is the step most people skip and the one that saves the most grief.

If your laptop is still under warranty, your first move is not to open it. It is to ask the shop you bought it from whether they will do the installation for you. Most computer stores in the Philippines will, and the fee is usually reasonable. If you bought the laptop online, contact the seller and ask directly, because plenty of online sellers have a physical service counter that is not advertised on the product page.

Ask specifically what the service covers, because it varies and the wording matters:

• Replacement or addition of the drive. Almost every store that offers this will do the physical swap.
• Cloning your old drive to the new one. Some will, some won’t. Ask before you assume.
• A fresh Windows installation. Some less technically inclined shops will offer this instead of cloning. That is fine if a fresh install is what you wanted anyway, but it is not the same thing, and if you have software you cannot reinstall you need to say so before you hand the machine over.

Confirm which of the three you are actually getting. A shop that says yes to “can you install this for me” is not necessarily saying yes to “can you move all my files and programs across.”

One more thing worth knowing: if you buy the drive from that same store, the installation is often free. It is worth asking what the drive costs there before defaulting to the cheapest online listing, because a small price difference can be cancelled out by free fitting and a warranty that stays intact.

If the store route is available to you and your machine is under warranty, take it. The rest of this guide is for readers who are out of warranty, whose warranty explicitly permits owner installation, or who have weighed it up and decided to proceed anyway.

First, Count Your Slots

Desktop owners have it easy. Most modern motherboards carry two or three M.2 slots, so upgrading means adding a drive alongside the existing one, copying across at your leisure, and deciding later whether to keep the old drive as secondary storage.

A smaller number of larger laptops, mostly gaming and workstation chassis, carry two M.2 slots as well. If yours is one of them, you are in the easy case. Install the new drive in the free slot, copy across internally, keep the old drive in place as secondary storage, and you are finished. Skip ahead to the assembly guide.

One warning specific to this path, straight from ADATA’s documentation: once the copy is done, the old drive and the new one must not both be left bootable and connected. Windows cannot tell two identical installations apart and will not know which one it is supposed to start from. Either wipe the old drive once you are satisfied the new one boots, or physically disconnect it for the first startup. On a single-slot laptop this takes care of itself, because you are swapping one drive for the other, but anyone keeping both installed needs to deal with it deliberately.

Thin-and-light machines, our Yoga 7i included, typically carry exactly one M.2 slot. And here is the part we want to state directly, because a lot of guides skip past it:

You cannot copy a drive to itself. Copying requires both the old drive and the new drive to be connected and powered at the same time, so that software can read from one and write to the other. One slot means one internal drive. There is no software that gets around this, and anybody telling you otherwise is either describing a different process or selling something.

An Enclosure is Required

A USB M.2 enclosure resolves the impasse, and we want to make the case for it properly rather than presenting it as an annoying extra cost. It is a small case that turns an M.2 drive into an external USB drive. During the upgrade it holds the new SSD so your machine can copy to it. Afterwards it holds the old SSD, and your 512GB drive becomes fast portable expansion storage that you will keep using for years.

That second life is the point. You are not buying a single-use accessory. You are buying the thing that turns your old drive from e-waste into a useful piece of kit, and it happens to solve the copying problem on the way there. Whichever route you pick below, and even if you decide to install Windows fresh rather than copy anything, the enclosure earns its keep.

Choosing an Enclosure

Almost any M.2 enclosure will get this job done, so do not agonise over it. There are three things worth checking before you buy.

• Drive support. M.2 drives come in two electrically different types, NVMe and SATA, and they are not interchangeable even though they look almost identical. The LEGEND 860 is NVMe, so an NVMe enclosure is all you strictly need. Enclosures that accept both are the more useful long-term buy, because the next old drive you want to reuse might be the other kind.
• Speed. Look for 5Gbps at minimum, usually printed as USB 3.2 Gen 1 or the older USB 3.0 label. 10Gbps, sold as USB 3.2 Gen 2, is noticeably quicker and is what we used here. The enclosure is the bottleneck for the entire copy, so this is the one specification that decides whether you wait forty minutes or two hours.
• A metal body or heatsink. Sustained copying makes drives warm. Most decent enclosures now use an aluminium shell that doubles as the heatsink, and it costs very little extra.

On brands, the cheap end is genuinely fine as long as you stay with a name that has a reputation to protect. Orico and UGREEN both sell competent aluminium enclosures at prices that will not make you wince, and both are easy to find in Philippine retail. If you would rather spend a little more, remember that this becomes the permanent home of your old SSD rather than a throwaway. SilverStone makes good ones, and we used an ASUS ROG Strix Arion for this upgrade, a 10Gbps NVMe enclosure with a tool-free tray and an aluminium body.

Count Your Ports Before You Order Anything

This is the part that catches people out, and it is much better worked through now than on the day.

The copy needs two USB devices connected at the same time: the flash drive you boot from, and the enclosure holding the new SSD. Our Yoga 7i made that easy, because it has one USB-A port and two USB-C ports. The boot drive went into USB-A, the enclosure went into one USB-C port, and the charger went into the other.

Do that arithmetic for your own machine before you order. Plenty of current thin-and-lights ship with two USB-C ports and nothing else. On one of those, the enclosure takes one port and your boot drive takes the other, and suddenly there is nowhere for the charger. That matters more than it sounds. A clone can run well over an hour, and running the battery flat partway through is exactly the situation you do not want to be in.

Before You Copy: Slim Down First

Whatever you decide next, do this first. Empty the Recycle Bin. Clear your Downloads folder. Uninstall the software you have not opened in a year. Move your finished video projects and your 2019 phone photo dump onto an external drive.

Three reasons this is worth an hour of your time. The copy runs faster because there is less to copy. Anything you are about to reinstall from scratch does not need carrying across. And if you end up using an external drive as a waypoint, a smaller pile is the difference between fitting and not fitting.

Now the Real Decision: Clone or Fresh Install

This is the fork that matters, and it is worth slowing down for. The hardware side of this upgrade is a screwdriver and fifteen minutes. Plenty of people who can handle that with no trouble at all get stuck here instead, because the question is not really about drives. It is about what you would lose.

Cloning copies your existing Windows across exactly as it is. Every application stays installed and activated, every setting survives, every saved password and file location is preserved. You reboot into the same machine with more room.

A fresh install puts a clean copy of Windows on the new drive. Nothing carries over. You reinstall your applications and copy your files back yourself. The result is a laptop with no accumulated clutter, no leftover manufacturer bloatware, and none of the slow creep that builds up over years.

We recommend a fresh install for most people, because the whole point of this upgrade is a machine that feels new and copying years of accumulated mess onto a new drive works against that. But that recommendation only holds if nothing is trapped on your current install. That is what the audit is for.

A Straight Word About Software

Here is the part most owners never find out, and it makes this whole job simpler than it used to be. ADATA gives you the cloning software for free.

The ADATA SSD Toolbox is a free download from ADATA’s support site. It covers their solid state drive range, the LEGEND 860 included, and alongside the drive health, firmware and TRIM tools it carries a CloneDrive function built for exactly this task. Nothing in the packaging mentions it, no leaflet, no card in the box, which is why so few owners ever go looking.

That removes most of the usual friction. You do not need to buy anything, you do not need to build boot media, and you do not need to learn an unfamiliar utility. Download the Toolbox, install it in Windows, and the tool is sitting in the left-hand menu.

We ran our entire migration through it and it did the job without drama. Alternatives exist and we have kept them further down for anyone who wants them, but for an ADATA drive going into a Windows laptop, the Toolbox is the shortest path from A to B.

One scope note before you plan around it. ADATA’s own documentation states that while the drive you copy from can be any brand, the drive you copy to has to be an ADATA one. That is standard for manufacturer software and Samsung and Crucial do the same with theirs, but it is worth saying plainly: CloneDrive exists to move data onto an ADATA SSD, not to clone between any two drives you happen to own. For the upgrade in this guide that is exactly the case, since the LEGEND 860 is the destination.

Route 1: Cloning with ADATA SSD Toolbox

What you need:

• Your USB M.2 enclosure with the LEGEND 860 fitted inside it. We used an ASUS ROG Strix Arion.
• Mains power. Do not attempt this on battery.

That is the whole list. No flash drive, no boot media, no BIOS settings to change. The Toolbox runs as an ordinary Windows application and clones while Windows is running, which is the single biggest reason it is easier than every other route in this article.

The order matters and it is worth stating plainly. You clone first and swap second. The LEGEND 860 goes into the enclosure and stays there for the whole process. Your original drive stays inside the laptop, untouched and still running Windows. Only once the clone is finished and checked do you open the laptop. If anything goes wrong at any point, your original drive is intact and still bootable and you have lost nothing but an afternoon.

1. Prepare. Disable Fast Startup as described earlier, and do the slim-down pass if you have not already.
2. Check for encryption. Search for “Device encryption” or “Manage BitLocker” in the Start menu. Many laptops have this switched on by default and owners do not know it. Either suspend it before you start, or make certain your recovery key is saved somewhere other than this laptop. You can retrieve it from your Microsoft account online. Skipping this is the most common way people lock themselves out of their own data during an upgrade.
3. Download the SSD Toolbox. Go to the Download page in ADATA’s Support section and take the SSD Toolbox. It arrives as a zip file, ours was version 6.2.3. Extract it and run the installer.
4. Fit the new SSD into the enclosure and connect it. Handle the drive by its edges. Use a USB 3.0 or faster port, because the enclosure sets the pace for the entire copy. If Windows offers to initialise the new drive, decline.
5. Open the Toolbox and check both drives. The Drive Information screen lists everything it can see. Ours showed the laptop’s internal 512GB drive and the LEGEND 860 appearing over USB through the enclosure. Both should read healthy before you go any further. This screen is also where you will find drive temperature, firmware version and remaining lifespan, and it is worth a look even when you are not cloning.
6. Click CloneDrive. It is the last item in the left-hand menu. One screen, two panels: Source on the left, Destination on the right, with a dropdown under each.
7. Set your drives and check the figures. Source is your existing drive, Destination is the LEGEND 860 in the enclosure. Each panel shows capacity and used space, which is how you confirm you have them the right way round. Ours read 476 GB capacity with 409 GB used on the source, and 931 GB on the destination.
8. Press Start and leave it alone. The progress bar reports which partition it is working through. There is no reboot and no boot menu. Windows keeps running throughout. Do not close the lid, let the machine sleep, or unplug the enclosure.
9. Wait it out. Ours took 48 minutes and 23 seconds to move 409 GB across a 10Gbps enclosure. Budget an hour and go and do something else.

The One Step It Leaves You: Resizing

CloneDrive makes a straight 1:1 copy. It reproduces your old drive’s partition layout exactly as it was and does not stretch anything to fill the extra room. So when our clone finished, the new terabyte drive was carrying a 475GB Windows partition with roughly 454GB of unallocated space sitting at the far end of it, doing nothing.

Nothing has gone wrong when you see this. The copy is complete and correct. But finishing the job is fiddlier than most guides admit, and this is the part where we lost time, so it is worth reading before you start rather than during.

The problem is what sits between your Windows partition and that free space. A laptop drive is not two partitions, it is five or six. Ours came out of the clone looking like this: a small EFI boot partition, a reserved partition, the C: Windows partition at 475GB, a 200MB manufacturer recovery partition, a stray 846MB of unallocated space, a second 200MB recovery partition, and only then the 454GB of free space at the end.

Windows can only grow a partition into free space that sits immediately after it. Those two recovery partitions are parked in the way, which is why Disk Management greys out the Extend option and leaves people assuming the clone failed.

Fixing It Properly

Download MiniTool Partition Wizard Free. Move/Resize, Extend and Delete are all in the free edition, so nothing here needs a licence.

1. Try Extend first, because it sometimes just works. Right-click the C: partition, choose Extend, and open the “Take Free Space from” dropdown. If your large unallocated block appears in that list, take it, drag the slider across, click OK then Apply, and you are finished.
2. If only a small block is offered, that is the recovery partitions blocking it. Close the dialog. Right-click the first recovery partition sitting after C:, choose Move/Resize, and drag it as far to the right as it will go. Do the same with the second one. You are not deleting anything, only sliding them to the end of the drive.
3. Now all the free space is one contiguous block sitting directly after C:. Right-click C:, choose Extend, take the whole lot, and Apply.

The faster route, and what it costs you. You can simply delete the two recovery partitions instead of moving them, which is what we did once we had spent long enough on it. It works and it takes seconds. Understand what you are giving up first: the manufacturer’s recovery partition is your factory reset, and the Windows recovery partition is what powers Reset this PC, Startup Repair and the advanced startup options. Neither is something you use often, and neither is worth much on a drive you have just replaced, but losing them is permanent and it is your call rather than ours.

If you go that way, open an administrator Command Prompt afterwards and run reagentc /info. It will tell you whether Windows Recovery is still enabled, so at least you know where you stand.

Do all of this while the drive is still in the enclosure. Every piece of software work is then finished and verified before you pick up a screwdriver, and if any of it goes sideways your original drive is still sitting in the laptop, untouched and bootable. This is exactly why we clone first and swap second.

When C: reports the full terabyte, the drive is ready and you can swap it in.

If You Would Rather Not Use ADATA’s Tool

There are other ways to do this. They are all more work than the Toolbox and none of them is better for this particular job, but if you are cloning to a non-ADATA drive, or you simply prefer a tool you already know, here they are.

Alternative routes: Rescuezilla, Clonezilla and Acronis

Rescuezilla is free and open source, and it is what we would reach for on a non-ADATA drive. It runs from a USB stick rather than inside Windows, so nothing on your source drive can change midway through the copy. Underneath it is Clonezilla, with a proper graphical interface bolted on.

You will need a USB flash drive of 16GB or larger and balenaEtcher to write the Rescuezilla ISO onto it as a bootable image. Copying the file across in File Explorer does not work. Once written, restart, enter the boot menu with F12, F9, F2 or Escape depending on your brand, and pick the flash drive. If it refuses to load, Secure Boot is almost always the reason, so switch it off in BIOS and turn it back on when you are finished. Rescuezilla loads to a desktop, you choose Clone, then set source and destination the same way.

Rescuezilla leaves you with the same unallocated space that CloneDrive does, so the MiniTool resize above applies here too.

Clonezilla on its own is the only route that fills the drive without a separate resize step. Choose device-device, then Expert mode, then disk_to_local_disk, and on the advanced parameters screen select -k1, listed as create partition table proportionally. It is text-driven with no mouse support and looks alarming the first time, but it is not dangerous. It simply expects you to read every screen.

Acronis True Image is a paid product that ADATA has historically pointed owners toward. It works from inside Windows like the Toolbox does. If you already own a licence there is no reason not to use it, but we would not tell anyone to buy software for a one-time upgrade when ADATA supplies a free tool that does the same work.

Route 2: Fresh Install

Faster to complete, and the result is a genuinely clean machine. The work is all on the other side, in putting your things back.

Do this before you touch a screwdriver. Once the old drive is out, anything you forgot to prepare is a problem, so front-load all of it while the working machine is still in front of you.

1. Get your files off first. Copy everything you care about to an external drive or your cloud storage. Documents, Desktop, Pictures, Downloads, and anywhere else the audit in the next section turns up. Check it copied properly before moving on.
2. Download your drivers onto a USB stick. This is the step people skip and regret. Go to your laptop brand’s support page, enter your exact model, and download the network or wireless driver at minimum. Take the chipset and graphics drivers too while you are there. Put them on a USB stick, not on the laptop.
3. Make the Windows installer. Download the Media Creation Tool from Microsoft and write Windows to a separate USB stick of 8GB or larger.
4. Write down what you need to get back in. Your Microsoft account email and password, and your Wi-Fi password. People lock themselves out on a fresh install more often than they lose data.
5. Note your software list once you have worked through the audit below, so you know what you are reinstalling.

Your Windows licence is not something to worry about. On any laptop that shipped with Windows, the licence is tied to the machine itself and reactivates automatically once you are online. There is no key to find.

Once all of that is prepared, the order is the reverse of the cloning route: you swap the drive first, then install. The teardown is covered further down, and what happens after it is picked up in the migration section that follows.

The Audit: Do This Before You Choose

Sit down with the laptop for twenty minutes and work through this list. Write your answers down.

1. List your installed software. Open Settings, then Apps, then Installed apps. Go through the list and note anything you actually use.
2. For every paid item on that list, ask one question: could I install this again tomorrow? That means you can still download it, and you can still activate it. If the answer is no, or you are not sure, that is a mark in favour of cloning. The usual culprits are older perpetual-licence office suites, creative software bought before subscriptions, plugins and instrument libraries, accounting and point-of-sale software, and anything that came with a printed key on a card you have not seen since.
3. Check your activation counts. Some software allows a limited number of installs. Reinstalling burns one. If you are near the limit, cloning avoids the problem entirely.
4. Find your files. Look beyond Documents and Desktop. Is your email archived locally in Outlook rather than left on the server? Are your save games somewhere you would not think to look? Are your browser passwords synced to an account, or only stored on this machine?
5. Note your hardware. Printer, scanner, webcam, drawing tablet, anything older. Write down the model numbers now while you can still look them up on the working machine.
6. Be honest about the machine’s condition. Has it had malware? Does it crash? Is it carrying five years of software you no longer use? If so, do not copy the mess onto a clean drive.

The rule is simple. If anything in that list came back as “I could not get this working again myself,” clone. If it all came back clean, install fresh and enjoy the clean slate.

How-To: Installing/Replacing the M.2 SSD in a Laptop

This section applies whether you are cloning or installing fresh. If you have decided to let a service centre handle the swap, skip ahead to the closing thoughts.

The physical swap is the easy part. On our Yoga 7i it took under fifteen minutes including the careful bits. Read the whole section before you start so nothing surprises you halfway through.

What You Need

• A screwdriver and depending on your laptop, the bit will differ. Laptop bottom panel screws are small and soft, and a poorly fitting driver will round them out. This is not the place to improvise with a multi-tool.
• A plastic pry tool or guitar pick. Never a metal blade against the chassis edge.
• A clean, well-lit, non-carpeted work surface.
• A small container or magnetic mat for screws.
• Optional but recommended: an anti-static wrist strap. At minimum, touch a large metal object before handling components and avoid working in socks on carpet.

Step 1: Power Down Completely and Disable Fast Startup

A shutdown in Windows is not always a real shutdown. Fast Startup leaves the system in a hibernation-like state, which means the drive may still be holding data in a way that complicates copying and leaves the board energised. Go to Control Panel, then Power Options, then “Choose what the power buttons do,” click “Change settings that are currently unavailable,” and uncheck “Turn on fast startup.” Then shut down normally.

Unplug the charger. If your laptop has a removable battery, remove it.

Step 2: Open the Bottom Panel

Flip the laptop over onto a soft cloth so you do not scratch the lid. Remove every screw on the bottom panel and keep them organised. Laptop bottom panels frequently use screws of different lengths in different positions, and putting a long screw in a short hole will punch through something you care about. Lay them out in the same pattern they came from, or photograph the underside before you start.

Some screws hide under rubber feet or warranty stickers. Work around the perimeter and check for any you missed before applying force.

With the screws out, work the pry tool into the seam and release the clips gradually around the perimeter. You will hear them pop. Do not lever from one corner and lift, because that flexes the panel and breaks clips. Go slowly, all the way around, then lift straight up.

Step 3: Disconnect the Internal Battery

With the panel off you will see the battery occupying most of the lower half. Find its connector where it meets the mainboard and disconnect it. Most use a simple plug that lifts straight up, sometimes with a small retaining tab. This is a genuine safety step, not a formality. Working on a live board risks shorting something.

Step 4: Locate and Remove the Existing M.2 Drive

The M.2 slot is usually near the cooling assembly or along one edge of the mainboard. The drive itself is a small rectangular board, roughly the size of a stick of gum, held down at one end by a single screw. It may be covered by a thin metal shield or a thermal pad. Lift or unscrew that first if present, and note how the thermal pad is oriented so you can put it back the same way.

Remove the retaining screw. This is the single most losable screw in the entire operation, so put it somewhere deliberate immediately. Once the screw is out, the drive will spring up to roughly a thirty degree angle on its own. That is normal and expected. Grip it by its edges, never by the chips on its surface, and pull it straight out of the slot along the same angle.

Step 5: Install the LEGEND 860 SSD

The M.2 connector is keyed, so there is exactly one way it fits. Line up the notch in the drive’s gold contacts with the corresponding ridge in the slot, hold the drive at that same thirty degree angle, and slide it in. It should go in with light, even pressure. If it does not, you have it upside down or misaligned. Stop and check rather than pushing harder.

Once seated, the contacts should be fully hidden inside the connector. Press the free end of the drive down flat against its standoff and reinstall the retaining screw. Snug is enough. Overtightening cracks the board.

If your laptop had a metal shield or thermal pad over the drive, reinstall it now in its original orientation.

Step 6: Reassemble and First Boot

Reconnect the battery. Seat the bottom panel and press around the perimeter until all the clips engage, then reinstall the screws in their correct positions. Start each screw by hand a couple of turns before driving it down so you do not cross-thread anything, and do not fully tighten any of them until they are all started.

Reconnect the charger and power on. If you cloned before swapping, the laptop should boot straight into Windows exactly as it was. If you are installing fresh, the machine will report no bootable device, which is the correct behaviour for an empty drive and not a sign that anything went wrong.

Either way, enter BIOS or UEFI setup and confirm the drive is detected at the correct capacity. If the slot reads empty, power down, open it back up, and reseat the drive. A drive that was not fully inserted before being screwed down is by far the most common cause.

Realistically, though, this guide is aimed at people whose laptops have been in service a while. If your machine is three or four years old and out of coverage, the warranty question answers itself and there is nothing stopping you doing the work yourself. Older systems are often the best candidates anyway, because they shipped with the small drives that felt adequate at the time and do not any more, and plenty of them have an empty M.2 slot sitting alongside the original drive.

It is also worth saying that nothing here is specific to M.2. The same sequence works for a SATA drive going to another SATA drive, and for an ageing SATA drive being retired in favour of an M.2 one, which on a lot of machines from that era is the single biggest improvement still available to them. The connectors change and the physical fitting changes. The audit, the cloning, the resize and the rule about keeping your old drive untouched all stay exactly the same.

How-To: Moving Your Windows Installation Across

If you took the cloning route, this part is already behind you. The copy was made and resized before you opened the machine, so all that is left is to power on and confirm it came up. Ours did, with the LEGEND 860 now showing as the internal drive running at Gen4 x4, and every application, setting and saved login exactly where we left it. Nothing to reinstall and nothing to reactivate.

It is worth opening the SSD Toolbox once more at this point. The Drive Information screen should report the LEGEND 860 at its full capacity with your data on it, which is the clearest confirmation that both the clone and the resize did what they were supposed to. The Toolbox also carries a built-in Benchmark if you want to see the drive working in its new home, though ADATA note that results shift depending on the laptop, the processor and the M.2 slot it is sitting in, so treat anything it reports as a sanity check rather than a benchmark figure.

If you are installing Windows fresh instead, the rest of the work starts now. Boot from the Windows USB stick you prepared, delete any existing partitions on the new drive when the installer asks where to install, and let it create what it needs. When Windows comes up, install your network driver from the USB stick first, get online, and let Windows Update fetch the rest. Then reinstall your applications and copy your files back.

Either way, put the old drive into the enclosure once you are settled. It is now both your portable expansion storage and an untouched backup of your previous setup.

No Internet After a Fresh Install? Use Your Phone

Here is the trap. Windows 11 Home and Pro both expect an internet connection during setup, and a freshly installed Windows may not have the driver for your laptop’s wireless card yet. That leaves you needing internet to get the driver that gets you internet.

Your phone solves it, and this is why we told you to keep it handy.

If you have an Android phone, this works with no drivers and no preparation, because Windows already includes everything needed:

1. Connect the phone to the laptop with its normal charging cable.
2. On the phone, open Settings, then Network and internet, then Hotspot and tethering. Wording varies slightly by brand.
3. Turn on USB tethering.
4. Windows detects it within a few seconds and you are online. No driver installation, no setup.

Use it to pull down your wireless driver, install that, then disconnect the phone. Watch your data allowance if you are on prepaid, because Windows Update will help itself.

If you have an iPhone, be aware in advance that USB tethering will not work on a fresh Windows install. It needs Apple’s mobile device drivers, which are not included with Windows and cannot be downloaded without internet. Your options are to use the iPhone’s Wi-Fi hotspot instead if the laptop’s wireless is already working, borrow an Android phone for ten minutes, plug into a router with an ethernet cable or a USB-to-ethernet adapter, or simply download the wireless driver onto a USB stick beforehand as we recommended above. That last one is why it is step two of the preparation list.

After the First Boot

A short checklist whichever route you took:

• Open File Explorer and confirm C: reports close to the full terabyte. If a clone still shows the old size, the resize option was missed and you can extend the partition afterwards or redo the transfer.
• Re-enable Secure Boot in BIOS if you disabled it.
• Re-enable device encryption if you suspended it.
• Confirm Windows reports the drive as an SSD, which it does automatically on a properly detected NVMe drive.
• Check Device Manager for anything with a warning triangle, which means a driver is still missing.

If Something Goes Wrong

• Laptop reports no bootable device. Check BIOS detects the drive. If it does, check the boot order. If BIOS does not see the drive at all, it is not seated properly. Reseat it.
• Windows installer USB will not boot. Secure Boot is the usual cause. Disable it in BIOS and try again, and turn it back on afterwards.
• No Wi-Fi after a fresh install. The wireless driver is missing. Install it from the USB stick you prepared, or use Android USB tethering as described above.
• Clone fails partway. Most often a filesystem error on the source drive. Boot back into Windows, run chkdsk C: /f from an administrator command prompt, restart, and try again.
• New drive reports the old capacity after a clone. This is expected, not a fault. CloneDrive copies 1:1, so the resize step with MiniTool Partition Wizard is the fix. If you already ran it and the capacity still looks wrong, you either extended into the small pocket of unallocated space instead of the large one, or the recovery partitions are still sitting between C: and the free space. Move them to the end of the drive with Move/Resize, then Extend again.
• Windows asks for a BitLocker recovery key. This is why we said to save it. Enter it from your Microsoft account and it will proceed.

In every one of these cases your original drive is still intact and still bootable. Put it back in and you are exactly where you started with nothing lost. That is the entire reason both routes keep the old drive untouched until the very end.

Was It Worth It

The Yoga 7i went from a machine we were actively managing to one we simply use. That is the whole return on the investment, and it is a bigger quality-of-life change than the spec sheet suggests. There is no longer a mental calculation before installing something. Windows updates without complaint. The photo library lives on the internal drive where it belongs.

The LEGEND 860 is a sensible pick for this job specifically because it does not try to be more than it needs to be. It is quick where you notice, it fits in a thin chassis without clearance problems, it carries a 5-year limited warranty, and it is priced for someone upgrading a mid-range laptop rather than building a halo desktop. For a drive that will spend its life inside a laptop handling browsers, office work and the occasional game, that is the right set of priorities.

As for the upgrade itself, the physical work is a genuinely accessible afternoon project and the enclosure pays for itself the moment your old drive becomes a portable one. Spend your thinking time on the audit instead. Getting the clone-or-fresh-install decision right is what separates a smooth upgrade from a frustrating weekend, and it is the one part of this that nobody else can answer for you.

And if opening the machine is not something you want to do, or your warranty says otherwise, there is no shame in the alternative. Buy the drive, hand it to your brand’s service centre, and let somebody who does this daily spend fifteen minutes on it. The laptop ends up in exactly the same place.

The ADATA LEGEND 860 is available in 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities. You can find it here: ADATA LEGEND 860 PCIe Gen4 x4 M.2 2280 SSD on Shopee Philippines