First SSD + Drive Migration

nerobart

nerobart

nerobart

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Joined
26 Aug 2011
Posts
78
Hi

I am a typical user of a computer. I mostly browse net, some office work and some call of duty in mt free time :)


I have some questions about SSD drives:

- Will I see improvement from HDD to SSD?

- Are SSDs more reliable than HDDs?

- I am looking for an SSD drive in the price range up to £150, it has to be reliable!

- I am also looking for an application to migrate my applications from HDD to SSD. I have about 50 GB of applications with are set up and I can not loose this settings. Is there any possibility to do this ? Also, will this preserve my Windows Settings such as printer settings ?
 
yes
yes

and macrium reflect will clone your drive to your new ssd provided the data will fit ect

paragon migrate is good aswell but you have to pay for that,macrium has free 30 day trial but it will do what you need
 
1 - Yes.

2 - It's debatable. In theory they should be but due to SSD's being relatively new there's no black and white answer.

3 - Reliable? Crucial M4. Intel 330 series. Samsung 830. Samsung 840 is too new to comment upon.

4 ->

Attach your SSD to your system. Run diskmgmt.msc. Say yes to the initialize popup. Format the disk as NTFS/Quick.
This step will make sure your disk is aligned correctly and will avoid a possible re-activation of Windows. Rare.

Install Macrium Reflect Free.

Clone your old drive onto the SSD. Shut down and detach the old drive. Power up.

Everything should be fine but you may need to do some research (assuming it's Windows 7):

- How to check AHCI is enabled and your SSD is performing OK. AHCI is better than IDE mode.
- Change to AHCI on a running system.
- Disabling Prefetch and Defrag is essential. Some other tweaks are less useful in the long run but worth reading about.
 
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Thank you guys for a fast answers, I have about 750gb taken on my HDD. Can I take a clone of part of the HDD lets say, Windows + few apps ?

I am thinking of getting a Samsung 840 (250gb) or 840 PRO (120gb) or M4 (250 gb) ? From reviews I can see these are a pretty decent SSDs. Are there any "bad" bits I should know about this SSDs? Can I get any better SSD for that price ?

Obviously 840 PRO will perform best out of those, but will there be much drop in performance on these?

I am using Windows 8 pro
 
any of those drives will be fine,you wanna go for one with the largest space

you cant clone over folders ect,your best doing a fresh install on your ssd,once done plug back in your old hdd and keep what you want ect,drag/drop over the programs to your ssd,some might work others will need a re install

and set the ssd as first boot device in the bios,set to ahci mode before you install windows
 
If you are a bit of a tech numpty I'd just do a clean install on the SSD and copy over/re-install your stuff afterwards as wazza suggests.

The other option would be to move as much data off your HDD until it will fit on the SSD during a clone operation.

Given you seem to be a bit of storage monster I'd not even bother with 128Gb drives. Shuffling data back and forth because the SSD is full gets annoying and ruins your fun times.
 
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