First off, my Win7 install dates back to when it came out, some of you will already know that I do maintain my OS to a somewhat anally strict level and as such, once the HDD is booted up and running, it runs as smooth as a peach. I do not have rogue reg entries from uninstalled games and software as I manually remove those, I do not have crap and temp files all over the place as I manage those too.
I do have a lot of software installed though and a lot of customisations which would take me many hours to put back to this state. Previously this same install got cloned from a 320GB Seagate SATA II drive to a WD Black 500GB so this isn't the first time this install has moved home
I'm creating this thread because I think there are others in the same situation I found myself, with a smooth install and not wanting to reinstall everything again.
There are many guides online showing you how you can migrate a normal HDD to an SSD, some recommend Windows Backup & Restore while others recommend various HDD/Partition Managers.
I used Acronis 12 as that's what I had access to and it's worth noting that Acronis 11 and 12 have full support for SSD drive alignment even though no documentation mentions SSD at all!. It also seemed to be the simplest.
Prep:
Before creating an image backup you will need to prep the OS to be SSD ready. I disabled the usual stuff, defrag schedule, prefetch (not superfetch, this is something completely different and is needed), Windows Search, System Restore and set the Pagefile to a fixed 1024MB.
I then ran a cmd to make sure my OS was TRIM enabled.
It's not safe to start the backup/imaging process. It should be noted that you should make sure the OS partition is smaller than the size of the SSD otherwise it won't fit
Restore:
I created 2 backups on to an external backup drive, one Windows Image Backup (.vhd) and one Acronis image (.itb) just to be doubly safe.
I partitioned the SSD using Acronis (booted off the CD) by creating a single partition leaving 1MB of unallocated space before the partition, this was recommend a number of times on Paragon's forums by admins in other threads about SSD migration. Then I selected to mark the partition as active.
From here it's a simple case of restoring the whole drive on to the SSD. Took about 30 minutes to restore the 81GB partition.
At this point I should add that my original HDD install was NOT correctly aligned for SSD usage, AS SSD reported it as a bad alignment. This will be the test to see if Acronis does indeed support SSD alignment (it did
).Plugged the new SSD in and booted up and all was superb. Windows detected the new drive and rebooted then I did a system performance scan and did a few benchmarks (below). Performance is exactly on spec and I have had absolutely no problem at all. My old install has a new lease of life, everything loads in an instant, my PC boots up and logs in before my LAN has had time to initialise and STEAM/Origin start in offline mode until a few seconds pass - Simple outstanding!
AS SSD:
ATTO:
Winodws:
SSD = Best performance upgrade you can ever do to your computer!
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