Migrating from HDD to SSD

I am contemplating getting SSDs for my system, and am wondering if anyone will share their experiences (good, bad and indifferent) with this.

 

The first one I'm thinking of getting is a 500 GB Samsung, which is available here for about EUR350. It supposedly comes with cloning software - is that any good, or should I get some other software?

 

Any thoughts and opinions appreciated.

 

Jorgen

First off, 350€ for a 500GByte SSD is way too expensive. You get 1 TByte for less than 300 these days (every brand).

 

The good: silence and speed. An SSD does not make any sound, and access times are at least 4 times faster than what you had with the HDD (depending on your model of HDD maybe even much more than that).

 

The bad: An SSD will not "announce" that it may fail like a HDD does. If it decides to stop working it is just dead, no way to recover. A HDD usually at least warns you by longer access times or funny noises, and specialized companies can recover a HDD if it is really important. So you should put some kind of backup strategy in place (I put all my HDDs in an external drive case and use them for backing up full system images).

 

The cloning software usually works. You can do the same with system images, if your SSD is at least as big as the HDD was. Or you can use Acronis, which is a very powerful tool.

+1 on evm's comments regarding price - there are better deals out there........and also to his comments regarding failures - however most specialists/techie sites do lean towards a SSD being more reliable than a HDD with SSDs having a higher MTBF (mean time between failures than a HDD. However, having a good backup strategy in general always saves a lot of heartache irrespective of whether you use a SSD or HDD.

 

There are a number of ways to replace a HDD with a SSD but take a look at the following - http://www.howtogeek.com/199068/how-to-upgrade-your-existing-hard-drive-in-under-an-hour/ - it gives you an idea of what needs to be done and also links to an alternative piece of cloning software to Acronis which, whilst not as powerful, may be all you need to accomplish what you want to do.

 

It should also be noted that you may also need to get a suitable data transfer kit/connector - this will depend on whether

 

A. You have and chose to use an available spare slot to install the new drive prior to cloning or

B. The drive is cloned prior to installing into the rig (this is definitely the way to go if you are cloning a drive with the OS on)

 

Most SSD Manufacturers offer such kits, either as a standalone item or bundled with a drive.

Bought my SSD about 6 months ago. Best choice ever.

Fast, does not get hot, and doesn't make a sound.

No more grinding noise all the time while Windows writes to and reads from the Cache on the C drive.

 

I bought a 256gb Sandisk. Large enough then, though it's now just over half full, and I'm slowly wishing I had gotten a 500gb one.

 

When I got my SSD I also got a small metal tray to mount it in a 3.45 Inch disk slot. that cost 15 Dollars, and included a free copy of Acronis True Image. Indeed a great program and I still use it to make system Images regularly. (I store those on a usb3 External HDD).

 

To copy the system to the SSD I made a system Image of the C drive on the HDD and stored the Image on the EHDD.

Then I disconnected the HDD, and connected the SSD.

I restored the Image, to the SSD.

I reconnected my HDD, and the old C on it was now D, and Windows ran from the new C on the SSD.

I took my time planning it all, but then it went really smoothly.

(To make the Imange with Acronis you have to install Acronis first. Then from within Acronis you make a usb Boot disk that contains Acronis. You use that to make the Image, and you also use it to restore the Image.)

(Note, the EHDD that contains the Image must not be password proteced.)

 

That drive tray I bought was from PNY. I believe it's still being sold.

 

Whatever Image program you decide to use, make sure you read the instructions very carefully before usig it. The devil is in the details. Also read other peoples user experiences with restoring in forums to give you an idea of the things people run into when restoring.

For example, some programs require the disk that the image is made of to be smaller then the disk it is restored to. Meaning, if you have a C drive of 300gb, and a SSD of only 256, you have to shrink the C drive in size before making the Image.

I have used free AOMEI Backupper to migrate my Windows 10 from my old HDD to SSD, it's convenient and allow me to align partitions to optimize for ssd - there are two alignment possibilities used by Windows: CHS(Cylinder, Head, Sector)alignment and 1MB alignment. And SSD require partition alignment to 4KB boundaries for optimum performance and life, which is fine with 1MB aligned partitions (1MB aligned partitions are also aligned on 4KB boundaries) but not CHS aligned partitions(CHS aligned partition are often aligned on 31.5KB which will degrade SSD performance and life time). Therefore, we need a software with partition alignment function.