Samsung 860 QVO Data Migration question

[magick]

Hi,

I have a 17 Omen laptop with a 250gb WD Blue SSD OS drive and a 7200rpm 2.5" data drive. I have my OS and Apps installed on the C Drive (SSD) and my Steam, Origin and Battle.Net games installed on the D drive.

Now I'm thinking of replacing the Mechanical drive with a 2tb Samsung SSD. I Will also buy a 2.5" USB 3 enclosure. Now To transfer all the data from my D drive to the SSD am I able to :-

1) put the Samsung SSD in the Enclosure
2) connect to Laptop and then format the drive using Windows disk manager
3) Copy and paste all files from D drive to SSD
4) Remove HD and replace with SSD and then boot up as normal and all my installed games will work as normal?

Or would I be better using the Samsung Migration software you can download off Samsungs site? I've reads the online manual for the Samsung Migration software and based on what I can see it only gives you option to clone your OS drive and not a secondary drive. Can someone please confirm this?

Thanks

 

[heatonpkmassive]

If your data drive was installed when you first installed Windows, you'll need to do a fresh Windows install as the original installer will have put certain boot files on that disk, even though it wasn't your main disk for booting. Cloning would be a pain if it is possible, that drive would always need to be attached for Windows to boot.

However, if that data drive was not installed when you installed Windows, remove it and make sure it still boots into Windows afterwards. It won't work cutting and pasting. You'll need to use the Samsung software or better still, the free version of Macrium Reflect. That's just for your boot drive. If your data drive contains only Steam, Origin, Uplay, etc. games, you can put your old data drive into an enclosure and copy the game files back, then point your game client, Steam or whatever, to the directories on your new drive. Just Google ways of doing it, I prefer loading up Steam, letting it start downloading the games I want, then quit Steam after a few seconds of downloading. This will create directories on your new boot drive for your games. You just then replace these directories with the backed up ones off your data drive.

 

[erill1971]

what he is planning will work just fine.
just make sure to change the device letter to match , ie: d: if the drive appears as anything else just change to d: and all will work fine.
or the better option just clone d: to new drive , when finished just swap drives over, same thing applies to the device letter.
macrium reflect is ideal for cloning.