SSD prices climbing fast!

Absolutely Clueless · Thursday at 20:48

Raymond Lin said:
I have a spare 4TB portable HDD that was used for my Xbox, since I no longer play on it, I have unplugged it and now doing nothing, that is my overflow until things settles down. Hopefully it will but I should have enough SSD to last me a while.

I must admit, I was very tempted to buy a 4tb PCIE 5.0 SSD in the recent sales (Crucial t710, SN8100 or Samsung 9100), but resisted. My PC is for gaming only and I have c1.7tb free, so that should be fine until AM6 and a full rebuild.... Not to mention, I didn't want to reinstall Windows on a new drive and start from scratch.

AyeAyeAhoy! · Thursday at 22:56

Absolutely Clueless said:
I must admit, I was very tempted to buy a 4tb PCIE 5.0 SSD in the recent sales (Crucial t710, SN8100 or Samsung 9100), but resisted. My PC is for gaming only and I have c1.7tb free, so that should be fine until AM6 and a full rebuild.... Not to mention, I didn't want to reinstall Windows on a new drive and start from scratch.

You don't need to reinstall Windows etc, just clone the current drive to the new and swap them over. It's very easy.

Absolutely Clueless · 2026-01-02T10:12:40+0000

AyeAyeAhoy! said:
You don't need to reinstall Windows etc, just clone the current drive to the new and swap them over. It's very easy.

I've read about that before but never looked into it. Is it foolproof? Will look into it for next time.

Thank you for the nudge!

SimonRigga · 2026-01-02T10:25:06+0000

Absolutely Clueless said:
I've read about that before but never looked into it. Is it foolproof? Will look into it for next time.

Thank you for the nudge!

I've clones my main boot drive several times over the years.. inbetween full re-installs where i completely change the computer..

Foolproof, is a loaded word.. but it's all reasonably easy and relatively straightforward.. just ensure you choose the correct drives at the time of cloning.. and your golden..

AyeAyeAhoy! · 2026-01-02T10:29:02+0000

Absolutely Clueless said:
I've read about that before but never looked into it. Is it foolproof? Will look into it for next time.

Thank you for the nudge!

Yes, I'd say is is. You just may need an external enclosure for the target SSD / Nvme.

I did one a few weeks ago using Acronis. It's about 5 clicks through a wizard on the machine you're cloning, swap the drives over, reboot.

If you have a Crucial drive on the system at all, then you can do it for free here https://www.acronis.com/en/promotion/crucialhd-download/

Vimes · 2026-01-02T11:58:21+0000

Absolutely Clueless said:
I've read about that before but never looked into it. Is it foolproof? Will look into it for next time.

Thank you for the nudge!

I do that with Macrium Reflect, to the point of extending the partition to fill the new drive, if going to a larger capacity new one. It works a treat.

adidan · 2026-01-02T12:07:59+0000

Absolutely Clueless said:
I've read about that before but never looked into it. Is it foolproof? Will look into it for next time.

Thank you for the nudge!

I've done it with AOEMI free version in the past.

That said if I'm moving to a brand new drive I tend to use it as an opportunity for a completely fresh install to clear out any accumulated deadwood

Armadillo · 2026-01-02T18:34:39+0000

Last time I used macrium reflect, it didn't go so well, no idea why, worked fine in the past.

Cloned my then current drive to my new drive, macrium reflect showed everything that windows needed had been cloned, new drive was set as the boot device, was booting fine from that drive and all looking good. Soon as I formatted the source drive, windows stopped booting. No idea what went wrong. Just took the opportunity to do a fresh install, couldn't be bothered to troubleshoot.

Normally I just unplug the source drive to make sure all is good, but both were m2 drives, so it was just not practical and well macrium has never failed me before that.