How to transfer from HDD to SSD easily.

[TW]Sponge

[TW]Sponge

[TW]Sponge

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Hi guys. Just bought myself a laptop (Lenovo y50-70) and it's taken me a few days to realise the OS (win10) has been installed on the HDD, whilst I have a 25gb SSD sat in there doing absolutely nothing.

Now, obviously I have been installing things left right and center on the original hard drive (including the dreaded 65gb GTAV). Is there some easy way of transferring just the OS onto the SSD?

I'm thinking the only option is to transfer all my data somewhere then make the switch, hopefully I'm wrong and there is a simpler way.

Also the laptop came with Win8 installed, and I upgraded to 10 as most people did. If I was to re-install the OS, would it re-install 8 or 10?

Cheers.
 
dneill2006 said:
Is the SSD drive not being used as a cache drive to speed up your HDD?

This is how most laptops that come with a small SSD work.
Click to expand...

All it's got installed are some drivers for the camera, chipset, touchpad etc.....

Basically I just want the OS on it to speed up boot times and general running of the machine.
 
Sounds a bit fishy that they'd install the SSD and not put it to use. You sure it's not configured to use Intel Rapid Storage Caching to accelerate the system by caching the most frequently accessed files on the HDD? This is usually how a small SSD is used.


If the SSD really isn't being used you could try...

Back up your files including steam library to a different drive.

Create a full system image of the HDD in case the process of tinkering fails, then you have a path back to where you are now.

You can then use the W10 refresh feature (not reset) to strip everything out back to the OS but this may remove some or all of the Lenovo installed stuff.

You need to understand what the partitions on the HDD are for so you can move the right ones to the SSD. There is probably an OEM one and a recovery one that you'd want left on the HDD as a minimum but there may be others. This way the Lenovo Recovery option should still be accessible.

Then use something like Macrium Relect to create an image of each partition to an external drive.

Then use Macrium Reflect to restore selective partitions from the external drive to the SSD.

If it all works out you could then delete the corresponding partitions from the HDD that were restored to the SSD and reuse them for user data storage etc.
 
Nothing on the SSD suggests that it is used for caching, but then I'm a bit of a noob when it comes to software etc..

Thanks for the suggestion and I'll give it a go when I next have the time. Cheers.
 
From a quick look the stock options of that laptop are:

1TB HDD + 8GB SSD cache
1TB SSHD (16-24GB cache) (not very common configuration)
256GB SSD

Can't see an option with 25GB SSD - which would be an odd number as usually even a 32GB SSD would have more than that useable unless it has a recovery partition on it (unless its a 24GB SSHD cache that shows as approx 25GB).
 
Last edited:
A SSD doesn't show up in Windows explorer when used as a cache under Intel RST. You need to use the RST application to see the SSD and how it's configured.
 
Might not be using Intel RST - on my Samsung laptop the 8GB express cache can be seen as a 8GB SSD in disk manager and formatted as a drive (knocking out caching).
 
[TW]Sponge;28760354 said:
My windows folder is 18gb. Plenty of room. I don't plan on installing anything else on it.
Click to expand...

Sure... 25GB will be more than enough space on an SSD... very practical and should last you years. ;)
 
^ hehe - after a few months my Windows folder sits at 26.6GB and that isn't taking into account program files folders though I suspect I could clean that up a little.
 
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