Copying OS to SSD

[Jukebox]

I’m planning to install an SSD to replace the existing spinner (W10) and would be grateful for advice on the best software to achieve this. A search brought up Easeus ToDo but I’m sure there must be others. Apologies if this has been covered before – I did a quick search but couldn’t find anything! Cheers, John

[PlaneMan]

Personally I wouldn’t bother. If you have the licenses for any paid for software, start from scratch using the media creation tool.

Can’t link too it as I’m on my Chrome Book and the M$ site just redirects me a direct download.

[Dave Rice]

You can use ToDo or the free EaseUS Partition Manager to clone the disk. You’ll then have to do the fix to let Windows know it’s an SSD.

However I would agree that it’s a good time to do a clean install.

[Bob Williams]

Good info, will this work via Easeus master Partition Manager to copy a Win7 from spinner (1tb) to an SSD?

When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.

[JayCeeDee]

I tried ( and bought, unfortunately ) Paragon Migrate OS to SSD, but it failed multiple times because of ” Missing Files” – well good luck trying to sort out which ones were missing.

At the time, I was having problems updating W10 to the latest version. I was on Anniversary and wanted to get to Fall Creators, but my machine was having none of it.

It was time to download the latest version, install it to my SSD and then re-install all my favourite programmes. It was a chore, it took a while, but the system has been flying ever since. Go for it!!

PS – I kept my old drive in there as a spare which would have produced a working system on its own. I transferred Docs Pics and Vids to a spare drive and just have some tidying up left to do.

[Dave Rice]

Bob, yes but you may have to shrink the partitions on the original to fit.

[Bob Williams]

Thanks Dave, Easeus will help me shrink. Now for an SSD!

When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.

[Bob Williams]

SSD purchase.

Decided upon 1 of 3, all 480 GB as this is the size that meets my requirements, I have a 1TB spinner which in all my years of building & using various PC’s, and accumulating stuff, has only used 120 GB, probably because I save to a 2TB NAS. I will be using more in the near future, but not much more than around 300Gb, although I want “headroom”. 480 GB should give me this. And a faster PC of course. I already have a 32GB Sandisk Cache drive*, will I still need that? The 3 drives considered:

SANDISK –      http://tinyurl.com/ycup8cjy

KINGSTON –       http://tinyurl.com/ybz5c4af

TOSHIBA –      http://tinyurl.com/y82yxh78

Any advice welcome and much appreciated, TY guys.

*As recommended a few years ago by Dave, still going strong and still doing its job day after day.

 

When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.

[Dave Rice]

Any of those will do, but I am upgrading a customer laptop to a Kingston 480 this morning and my own laptop has one too. I got mine from Amazon for £68.

You can ditch the cache drive, it’s only of any use with a spinner.

[Bob Williams]

Thanks Dave. I am torn between the Sandisk (ebuyer £66.98, free delivery) and the Samsung (Overclockers at£68.99 + delivery) I have a home for the cache drive, No.2 gson will take it, has 3x (2TB) spinners, no SSD despite my encoragement.

Think it will be the Sandisk. Differences in read/write are not great enough to concern, both have limited 3 yr. Warranty.

Thanks for all the great advice you always give, much appreciated. Hope you’re feeling OK today.

 

When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.

[Dave Rice]

Just completed the upgrade job. EaseUs Parition Manager just couldn’t get the cloning right for the new disk to boot. I think the myriad of Lenovo partitions on there had some thing to do with it. There were even partitions after the W10 one.

Anyway I put the old disk back in the laptop and downloaded EaseUS ToDo Free (I use the paid for version on my laptop) and did a System Backup to an external drive. I then created a ToDo boot USB stick (could be a DVD), stuck the new drive in, booted from the USB and did a restore.

It had only backed up the MS boot and the W10 partitions, none of the Lenovo stuff, and it booted first time. Went into Disk Management and expanded the partition into the free space. If you leave out the failed attempts with EPM the ToDo process too about 2 hours for a 128GB SSD to 2.5″ spinner and back to a 480GB SSD. Most of that is sat about waiting.

[Bob Williams]

Thanks again Dave, that is a good layout of what I need to do. OK to copy/paste that post?

Cheers, Bob.

When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.

[Dave Rice]

Sure.

[Richard]

With one of the machines I upgraded from spinning rust to an SSD I also had a ‘bit of a time of things’ I ended up starting off a USB formatting the SSD I think then ‘installing a system image I had prepared earlier onto the SSD. Windows 10 uses the original Windows 7 image creation package and appears quite useful.

I was wondering about doing the last machine in the house using a spinner. The micro server is feeling very slow and the other machines are hardly fire breathing monsters. Then I wondered if increasing the memory from the original 2 GB to perhaps 4 Gb there is not a huge difference in price between 2 GB and 4 GB ECC corrected memory and a jump from 2 GB to a total of 6 GB might be as useful as the change from spinner to SSD as a first step. On the other hand is it worthwhile messing with a working 5 year old system? The existing spinner is only a 250 GB item with a small OS partition, so a cheap SSD is possibly worth my interest. I just wonder if it is worth the effort or the cost and whether any benefit would really be felt.

[Dave Rice]

The most useful single upgrade you can make is from a spinner to an SSD. Even an SSD to a new M2 SSD is noticeable, transfer rate more than double. But it’s not just the transfer rates, it’s the zero latency that is the real killer.

That’s not to say that the ram shouldn’t be upgraded too, but that will be noticeable when you are multi tasking and have run out of ram causing disk paging – to a slow spinner.

The server I am working on is 7 years old and the spinners are 5+, but it’s all still working OK. HP built it to last, but that’s not to say I’ll be ignoring the backup side of things!

The mega database servers I was using on the Carrier project are now bargain basement. HP ProLiant DL380 G7 2x Xeon E5620 2.40GHz 4 core CPU (8 thread) 24GB RAM P410i RAID card 2 x 72GB HDD for £120 inc p&p on EBay. If I had a large enough rack I’d be tempted.

[Richard]

Thank you Dave, I will have to plan that change for a quiet time as changing the drive is a little more of a task than simply powering the rig down and plugging in the new module.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

An upgrade to an SSD is the biggest speed increase you can get but upgrading from your 2GB of ram is well worth it too. 4GB will max out all your 32 bit apps if you run them one at a time. Interestingly 6GB is another sweet spot because many 64 bit apps that claim to need 8GB only actually need a bit more than 4. You do need to make sure you have the same amount of memory in all banks though so 8GB may actually be cheaper.

[Dave Rice]

I remember we did a lot of real world benchmarking back in the day of the old Forum with dual channel memory i.e. both modules the same. It made little difference apart from in the synthetic benchmarks.

My own laptop has 1 x 4GB and 1 x 8GB but it’s still dual channel

I think that’s a trick of the latest memory controllers.

What can screw thing up is mixing single sided and double sided, but that depends on how picky the motherboard is. I tend to go to the memory vendors website and see what they recommend.

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