Replace the SSD and/or HDD with a 500 GB M.2 SSD

[Ethyrdude]

Yes, this I understand. Every program that is currently installed on D drive will have to come off as cloning C drive would preserve that information in the registry and mess up any reinstalls.

[wesstrueb]

Hi, Ehtyrdude;

I don't claim to be any expert, but to me the better solution is option a, in your case. (I assume that your 120G SSD is your boot drive, as was mine). Since your boot drive gets beat on pretty much any time Windows does anything disk-related, I figure you need the extra time (and space) that a larger Windows drive would buy you. Compare the estimated lifespans of the two drives. This info can be found online. So, that 500G SSD would be a very good thing to replace your 120. Now, with regard to your 2T HDD, I see you say that you back your data up to some (removeable?) device, so the 2TB certainly isn't critical. But you still (in my opinion only!) might want to hang onto that. Throw as much of the work from your boot SSD to that drive (which with a 120G SSD, you probably already are), then run your data backups from it. When I swapped out my 120G SSD boot to a 240G SSD, I worried after reading all the things (like WInodws being a pain about really recognizing that the new drive was just an upgrade in space and not a "new" Windows installation). Turns out, the clone was the hardest part of the entire upgrade; the install was not an issue at all. Anyway, for longevity's sake I'd go with either a full option a) as you stated, or a slightly modified version. There is no "wrong" answer there.

Good luck no matter how you choose!

[wesstrueb]

Replying to my own reply. When I first opened this thread, I didn;t see the comment chain  you had going. My bad.

You're past any advice I gave you above, so I'll bow out gracefully!

Sorry...

[Ethyrdude]

@Wesstrueb - Apologies not needed and as for using the HDD for "other" stuff is good advice. I use my HDD for the windows swap file only as using any SSD for that seems counter productive.

[Ethyrdude]

Well because of real life, I'm going to have to put this on pause for a while as I have other things that need to get done. I have been doing some research to figure out what I can get and at what price as my budget is a bit limited currently. At one site I read that somebody used a HP EX900 1TB PCI-Express 3.0 x4 Internal Solid State Drive in a HP pc (I forget the exact pc model but it has the same motherboard), however, this SSD is no longer available at the site they got it from.

I contacted Sandisk as their SSD is currently in my PC (WDC PC SN520 SDAPNUW-128G-1006 128.0 GB) and they recommended the new SanDisk Extreme PRO M.2 NVMe 3D SSD. This is a $450 (CDN) SSD and just too expensive.

Crucial recommends the Crucial MX500 M.2 2280 1TB SATA III 3D NAND Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) CT1000MX500SSD4 and this one is available at $175 (CDN) currently, not as fast a drive, the read speed is half my current drive but the write speed is 2.5x as fast. Interestingly, this drive has a B and M key.

While not recommended, the Crucial P1 1TB 3D NAND NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD is currently on sale at $140 and is faster than the MX500 and has the M key only. Needless to say, I am finding this a bit confusing, as the motherboard has an M key slot and yet they recommend a B and M key card.

At this point I feel I should just go with an M slot card and try it. It will either work or not. If not, I can always return the card and if it does, it's a win.

[likecentre]

Great solution with SSD, my PC started to work better

[Ethyrdude]

I ordered a 500 GB SSD today but I want to make sure it works before I post any details about the drive. This will be more than adequate for my needs for now. All programs except for my steam account has been installed on the original SSD and will be cloned once my drive arrives. Steam has a utility that will allow me to reinstall my programs to the SSD from the HDD once my drive has been changed and Windows cloned onto the new drive and all is working.

If I run into any issues with the cloning, I will just do a fresh install, but I hope to avoid that as then I will have to reinstall all my Origin programs. I should have my new drive sometime this week. I'll let you all know how this goes. Fingers crossed!

[Ethyrdude]

My SSD arrived today - a Western Digital WD Blue SN500 NVMe M.2 2280 500GB PCI-Express 3.0 x2 3D NAND Internal Solid State Drive. This drive is as fast as the original but I ran into an issue with the cloning software. I suppose instructions would have helped but I decided to just download the Windows installation tool and ran a fresh install, so I will have to reinstall all my software. It's not a big deal. In any case, I am using my computer with the new drive and later on I will download Origin and Steam and all my programs that I want to keep. My data is still intact on D drive which will get cleaned up once all my programs are installed. Thank you all for your assistance.

[Grzwacz]

Hi,

Too bad you did a clean W10 install.

I gave you a link in a previous post on using Macrium Reflect free to clone the existing W10 install to the new SSD.

Regards

[Ethyrdude]

I mucked around for about a half an hour with different software options and I just couldn't get any to work so I just downloaded Windows which was really easy to reinstall and it activated automagically without issue. The only thing left to do is reinstall my software I use and the HP software as it doesn't take up much room and will probably be easy enough to get. If this was an HDD install I would be at this for hours but I'm actually almost done.

All my software that I had installed except for my steam library only took a total of 60 gb including windows so I knew the reinstall would go fast, otherwise I would have had to clone from the original SSD to a spare HDD and then from that to the new SSD and there just seemed to be too many steps where something could go wrong. Reinstalling Windows 10 was no big deal so that's the route I decided to take.