Hi, I'm about to buy a prebuilt PC (sacrilegious I know but I'm not very confident in my PC building ability, and I calculated the cost of the parts in said PC and I'm paying around 10-15% mark up compared to buying and assembling everything myself, so I don't feel too bad about it - the convenience is worth it for me) and have quite a minor issue I'm hoping someone can give some guidance on. My current PC has an M.2 SSD that has windows + all of my games on, and the new PC also has an M.2 SSD with windows installed on it. I was considering just swapping the new one out but my current one is 500GB and the new one is 1TB, so I'd be losing a lot of storage. There is only one M.2 slot on the new system also. What would be the best way to transfer my games to the new SSD? I have a 2TB SATA HDD, would moving all of my games/files to the 2TB drive from my current SSD, and then plugging that in to the new PC to copy to the new SSD work? I looked at adapters/external enclosures to connect my current SSD to the new PC, but I wonder if there would be problems connecting it that way due to it having windows installed? Or would that be doable? Apologies if this is super obvious, I'm quite a noob when it comes to inner workings of PCs. Thanks all!
Most efficient way of transferring games/files from one M.2 SSD to another? Both have windows installed. Only one M.2 slot available.
- Thread starter MrCheezle
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Hi and welcome to the forums. 
What are the specs of the new pc, specifically the make and model of motherboard because apart from a ITX board I can't think of any that only have a single M2 slot. Are you sure it only has a single slot or is it that it only comes with a single drive? You can easily use a external enclosure and having Windows on it is not a problem.
With regards to pre-built pc's, many, especially the cheaper ones, will have the cheapest components in them which will include the all important power supply, something that should not be cheaped out on. Do you know exactly what you are getting, make and model of each component or is it just a vague description such as 800w psu, B650 motherboard, 16Gb DDR5 etc? If I were to buy a pre-built pc I would want to know the exact make, model and speed of everything in it.
What are the specs of the new pc, specifically the make and model of motherboard because apart from a ITX board I can't think of any that only have a single M2 slot. Are you sure it only has a single slot or is it that it only comes with a single drive? You can easily use a external enclosure and having Windows on it is not a problem.
With regards to pre-built pc's, many, especially the cheaper ones, will have the cheapest components in them which will include the all important power supply, something that should not be cheaped out on. Do you know exactly what you are getting, make and model of each component or is it just a vague description such as 800w psu, B650 motherboard, 16Gb DDR5 etc? If I were to buy a pre-built pc I would want to know the exact make, model and speed of everything in it.
It depends. Some games will still work if you do that, but some won't. Shortcuts are also likely to be broken. Are they steam games, or manually installed? You could just copy the save game files.
Using an adapter/enclosure is the standard way in this event, but that's when someone uses cloning software. You have to use cloning software if you want to copy Windows intact, due to the boot/file system shenanigans. You can't just copy and paste it.
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a friend a while ago sent me a link that explains the "official" way of migrating a steam library from one drive to another it was a link to a valve/steam "approved" [for lack of a better term here] page ie not dodgy or anything
unfortunately i cannot remember the address for the link as i never ended up moving the 3 or 4 games ive actually got as im not much of a gamer casual gamer is still a stretch for me but its still maybe worth me mentioning it .
I'm pretty certain just copy and pasting the folder to another drive wont usually work for that particular scenario as stated above [and better explained than i am doing] so this comment isn't the most helpful post on the forum
BUT it might give you an idea of what to search for on your preferred search engine. I think in the steam app there's a link to how to do it actually lol. either way there is a way to migrate a steam library folder to another drive.
unfortunately i cannot remember the address for the link as i never ended up moving the 3 or 4 games ive actually got as im not much of a gamer casual gamer is still a stretch for me but its still maybe worth me mentioning it .
I'm pretty certain just copy and pasting the folder to another drive wont usually work for that particular scenario as stated above [and better explained than i am doing] so this comment isn't the most helpful post on the forum
BUT it might give you an idea of what to search for on your preferred search engine. I think in the steam app there's a link to how to do it actually lol. either way there is a way to migrate a steam library folder to another drive.
You can get a M.2 USB adapter. OCUK have a range of them:
Plug the old M.2 drive into the adapter and the adapter into your new PC, then copy data.
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