A silly question about hard drives

[RitualBlack]

I recently though about purchasing a SSD for my laptop. It room for two hard drives and I only have one hard drive in the laptop. I want the SSD to be my primary drive with windows installed on it and my ssd hybrid drive to be my storage drive. The thing preventing me from doing this that I don't exactly know an easy way to do this and I have a few questions about the process. Are both the following options viable? If they are the second one seems much nicer to me, but like I said, I don't know exactly if it will work or not :laugh: .

 

Option 1:

If I don't wish to dual boot every time I start up would I have to back everything up on my hard drive to an external drive, install windows and all drivers to the SSD and format the old drive?

 

Also, for reinstalling the drivers onto the new hard drive; do I simply download and install them even though they are already existing on the other drive? I was also wondering if all of this can be done through a usb 3.0 hard drive dock?

 

My last question is after I have installed Windows and all drivers is the hard drive ready to be put into the laptop and start up like normal? If it is I could than format the mechanical drive to rid it of windows and than put my stuff back onto it right?

 

Option 2:

Or... would the easiest way to do this be to back up things I don't wish to be on the SSD such as games/media/programs not frequently used and and than just clone the entire hard drive? After its cloned I format the old hard drive and than put everything back on it/ reinstall games with its new file path. (I am not sure if this works, but if someone could verify this for me it would make the swap really easy :tongue: )

 

Sorry for the novice question, but if anyone could help me understand the process a bit better it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks :happy:

[samadchaz]

option 1

yes you have to format if you don't want dual boot and for drivers their files (inf) needs setup means you have to install those too

you should install windows into ssd and storage in hybrid

[RitualBlack]

Ok, I have been doing some reading and there are a lot of complications with cloning a mechanical hard driver to a SSD so I will be skipping that altogether. I will go with option 1 and do a clean install onto the SSD and go from there.

[Erik005]

You can buy Samsung or crucial ssd's as a laptop upgrade kit that comes with a usb to sata cable and cloning software.

 

You clone the original hdd to the ssd and wipe the hdd and install the ssd and your done.

[RitualBlack]

You can buy Samsung or crucial ssd's as a laptop upgrade kit that comes with a usb to sata cable and cloning software.

 

You clone the original hdd to the ssd and wipe the hdd and install the ssd and your done.

 

That is what I thought of at first and than I started reading about issues when using a drive with less capacity, some things not working properly because the disk clone is based on a mechanical hard drive and problems with cloning and a SSD's alignment. Too much room for the drive to not run at its full potential. I don't know how much of the information is true or if it is just superstition but I think a clean install may be best.

[Vecna6667]

Ok, I have been doing some reading and there are a lot of complications with cloning a mechanical hard driver to a SSD so I will be skipping that altogether. I will go with option 1 and do a clean install onto the SSD and go from there.

 

The big problem with cloning a mechanical HDD to an SSD is the partition sizeof the original drive being too big. For example, if you were to try to clone a 1 TB Hard Drive to a 200 GB SSD, even if you were only using 100 GB of that 1 TB, the full 1 TB partition will try to squeze into that 200 GB drive and will fail almost all the time unless you shrink the partition, but that brings forth a new set of worse problems. A clean install is almost always the best option and cloning only works best when the original unaltered image can fit its full partition in the new drive.

[RitualBlack]

Thanks Vecna6667 for confirming my skepticism about the entire clone thing (+kudos). I am sure it works great and is a simple process to go from say a 320gb to a 500gb mechanical drive, but it is a good think to know that a HDD to a SSD is more complicated, especially before I buy it :tongue: . I will do a clean install when I decide to get the drive :happy: .