Replace HDD on Laptop with SSD

What SSD were you looking at? Any SSD will fit, you just have to make sure the SSD thickness matches your HDD. I think the thicknesses used are 7mm and 10mm.

Your TOSHIBA MK3265GSXN has a thickness of 9.5mm. Most SSDs are 7mm, so practically any SSD will fit. You can go thinner, but if you go thicker it might not fit in the laptop's drive bay. (For instance, some large hard drives are 12mm thick.)

Here's a selection from Newegg that will all work in your laptop. In your case, the only essential requirement is that you get the 2.5" form factor, not M.2 or mSATA.

Your laptop's spec is SATA-II while SSDs are SATA-III, but that just means you won't get the full speed out of the SSD that a newer laptop might. Don't worry about that, though, as it's still going to be noticeably faster than your current HDD.

As for brands, I typically recommend sticking to familiar memory chip manufacturers (Samsung, Intel, Crucial, Micron, Sandisk, Kingston, et al) rather than traditional disk drive manufacturers (Western Digital, Toshiba, Fujitsu, etc.). After all, SSDs are memory chips configured to look like disk drives, so I tend to trust manufacturers of memory chips to be right in their element here, more than manufacturers of magnetic media.

As for size, I wouldn't go smaller than 240GB, and SSDs larger than 512GB are still pretty pricey.

You mentioned, "I thought I'd upgrade the drive and get more space [than 320GB] as well." If the ~500GB range is beyond your budget, you might consider a ~250GB SSD internally and re-purposing your 320GB as an external data drive with an enclosure like this. Still another alternative is to replace your DVD drive with the 320GB HDD by using a second-drive media bay caddy, which allows you to have two drives in your laptop, but the downside is you'd lose regular use of your DVD drive.

SherriBabee said:

I looked up 2.5" form factor, not M.2 or mSATA to see what this meant and understand now.

When you click the Newegg link, in the left column try unticking 2.5" and tick both M.2 and mSATA. When you then click [Apply] Newegg will show you what those look like. It gives you a good visual representation, and you'll see they don't look anything like a hard drive.

Essentially, a 2.5" form factor SSD is the same chips but wrapped up in a plastic enclosure to be a drop-in replacement for a traditional hard drive. (In fact, if you crack open a 2.5" SSD you'll find the case is mostly empty, with just a few chips close to the connector end.)

I would like your suggestion on which brand to go with tho from your link

There are a lot of good brands. I tend to favor Samsung, but more because I've used a lot of them and not necessarily because others aren't as good. I know colleagues whose opinion I trust will swear by Intel, just as strongly. I've also used Sandisk and Kingston if I find a good sale, and had no problems with them. Crucial is my favorite source for RAM modules, so I wouldn't hesitate to use a SSD from them, either.

OTOH, I've on occasion had bad RAM from PNY, ADATA, and Hynix, so those wouldn't be amongst my first choices for SSDs.

You might also be confronted by terms such as SLC, MLC, 3D, etc. IME any differences between the specific technologies are mostly theoretical, and not much of a factor in typical use. In theory, some are supposedly faster or will last longer, but for typical users any differences are slight, at best. I consider price to be a more important factor.

You'll notice my Newegg link also preselects products directly from Newegg, and with a customer rating of 4 or 5. Amazon is also a good source, though I find Amazon's customer ratings are less trustworthy. A number of Amazon reviews will rate the vendor or shipping speed or packing rather than the actual product. Also, IMHO Amazon reviewers tend to be less tech savvy than Newegg customers. (For instance, they might buy a SATA hard drive to replace a failing IDE drive, then give it a one-star review because the product "didn't work".)

I've been a Newegg customer for about 15 years and they're always my first choice for tech stuff, but I tend to stick to items direct from Newegg rather than from their third-party affiliates. Same with Amazon; I'll buy from Amazon, but hesitate if it's from one of Amazon's third-party vendors. Shipping and customer service can be iffy if it's not directly from Newegg or Amazon. Some third-party vendors are good, of course, but it's just another variable I don't want to be bothered with if I don't have to.

ditto to everything pj1261 said.

I recently researched this area and decided on the Samsung 850 EVO based on 14000 5-star reviews on amazon, performance, and ease of cloning my boot drive. Had it for three weeks now and its been incredible.

Amazon.com: Samsung 850 EVO 250GB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-75E250B/AM): Computers & Accessories

By the way pcpartpicker.com is a handy site for searching compatibility, and finding the current best price.

Samsung 850 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (MZ-75E250B/AM) - PCPartPicker

My machine is a desktop with tons of sata ports so to do the cloning I just used a spare sata cable. In your case you may need to get a usb>sata cable for your cloning. Not sure.

https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-SATA-Drive-Adapter-Cable/dp/B00HJZJI84/ref=sr_1_6?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1487473803&sr=1-6&keywords=usb+2.0+to+sata+cable

The Crucial MX300 looks like an excellent choice to me.

I also like those media bay caddies. I use one on my Latitude E6430 laptop with a 1TB HDD in it, and a Samsung EVO SSD as the primary drive.

I'm not a fan of onboard laptop CD/DVD drives because it seems to me they never last that long. On the numerous laptops I've owned over the years, they all started malfunctioning after only a couple years. I suppose that's from constant banging around with the laptop--they're pretty fragile to begin with, and not as robust as a desktop optical drive.

I eventually decided it was more economical to just buy a USB optical drive that could be shared among multiple computers, and safely stowed away when not in use to avoid wear and tear. Once I did that, I concluded the onboard optical drive was superfluous and swapped it for a HDD in the media bay.

One idiosyncrasy I'll mention is my media bay HDD seems to park itself if it's left idle for awhile. You know how a CD or DVD will stop spinning after you've ignored it for awhile? Access it and it spins up, then keeps spinning in case another command is imminent. If one doesn't come, though, after awhile it stops spinning.

The media bay HDD seems to do the same thing. Once it spins back up, it's performance is fine. But leave it alone and after awhile it will spin back down. I don't know if that's a characteristic of my laptop (treating the media bay differently than the internal HDD bay), or if it's a characteristic of my particular HDD (spinning itself down if left idle for too long).

Either way, it's never bothered me enough to investigate further, but I thought I'd mention it in case you decide to try one of those caddies.