UKC

Morning , 

further to my threads yesterday about computers .

How hard is it to set up a SSD for a pc .  

Is it as simple as copying all the OS and programs from the HDD and setting it as the master drive.

Any information is gratefully received .

I'm thinking of buying one today in prep for the computer arriving. 

TWS

It is as simple as you say. Make sure that the SSD you buy comes with a utility to do this - I bought a Samsung one, and everything worked perfectly.

Excellent thanks .

I will look at them today then.

One question would be what size would be sensible for the OS and programs to reside on ? 

My old HDD was 180gb and everything else lived on external drives mainly .

You may as well go big and be future proofed.  In the popular sizes, Ebuyer has 120GB for £17, 240GB for £25-ish and 480GB for £43-ish.

Things to check: does your new PC have a spare slot for a second hard drive (almost certainly)?  You might as well leave the old HDD in as a backup device.

You'll probably need a tray (a couple of quid from ebuyer) to hold the new SSD in - the slot will likely be 3.5" and the new SSD 2.5".

You also need to check if the PC supports the newer M.2 type of drives, or (likely) only the older SATA drives. 

I've gone for 240 as to save a bit of cash

Certainly hope so now 

I'll look at these now - Brought !

I got a Crucial SATA 2.5 240 gb drive for 25 quid.

240GB will be fine - you have an enormous HDD to keep in there as a data drive!  I do something very similar - operating system, programs and desktop (where I keep stuff I'm currently working on) all held on the SSD, then a couple of HDD as long term backups.

Looks like you've bought a Dell Optiplex?  In that case, yes you have room for two.  You might not even have needed the tray, as they seem to have one built in.  This might turn out to be quite a useful website: https://www.dell.com/support/article/uk/en/ukbsdt1/sln298073/optiplex-9010-...

Precisely my thinking . 

Ah well it was only £1.60   so no problem .  Could come in useful in the future.

That's great

Thanks Jamie

You'll need a SATA to USB cable to temporarily attach the SSD to the PC. Costs a few quid from Amazon for ebay.

Plug the SSD into the PC and use something like Acronis TrueImage to copy the HDD to the SSD. This copies all the disk partitions, partition layout table, and the master boot record. Each logical drive (C:, D:, etc) has its own partition. Simply copying the disk within windows won't copy any of this hidden information.

Once the copy is done, shut the PC down, remove the HDD and replace it with the SSD. Turn the PC on and it should boot from the SSD. Job done. Keep the HDD for a while as a backup.

You can get a free 30 day trial of TrueImage at https://www.acronis.com/en-gb/homecomputing/thanks/acronis-true-image-2020/

Just brought one now on your recommendation .

:-D

Thanks

Why remove the HDD?  He wants to keep it as a data drive.  Surely easier to install the SSD directly into a spare bay and wire it in - then do the transfer.

Edit - a program like TrueImage will make the process simpler.

I did wonder about that .

I have a SATA cable from my old machine .

Either way for a few quid I'd rather have these bits of kit at hand just in case for future pc work.

Sorry. I didn't notice where you(?) said that your new machine has two bays.

You can just put the SSD into the vacant bay then image the old HDD onto the new SSD. My only concern would be that at that point you would have two identical drives in the machine, and you need to be careful that it boots from the SSD. Its not necessarily obvious. Using a sata/usb cable avoids this confusion, as you can temporarily detach the old HDD.

If you don't use a sata/usb cable then I would shut the machine down after the image process completes, then switch the drives so that the new SSD is in bay 0 where the old HDD was. Then turn the machine on, go into the bios settings, and make sure that the boot drive is the new SSD (changing it if necessary). Hopefully the two drives have different manufacturers so it should be obvious which one is which. Save the bios configuration and let the PC boot into Windows.

The old HDD should be present as drive D. I'd leave it for a while as a backup. Then, when you're happy that everything is ok, you could go ahead and re-format the D drive and use it for data.

Also, standard advice is to have an external inactive backup of your data when doing a migration like this. Using a sata/usb cable makes this easy. If the old drive stays in the PC then its not external or inactive, so proceed with caution (and at your own risk!).

Are you sure that would work? On my PC after copying the data to the SSD I went into the BIOS where it was possible to tell the system to boot from the SSD next time.

No worries I follow what your saying .

I use to build my own PC's many many years ago , so know my way around the bios settings and switching from Master to slave drives etc.

As long as I have all the bits and bobs I need I don't have to rush doing it .  I'm going to use the opportunity to move some equipment around in my studio for ease of access and working .

My suggestion to physically swap the drives is just for neatness really. The boot drive doesn't have to be in bay 0, and (depending on the bios) the pc would continue to boot from the old HDD even if it were moved. So my suggestion to set the boot drive in the bios is always necessary. But having the boot drive in bay 0 is normal practice and would be what someone unfamiliar with the specific PC would expect.

Sure, but the Bios in my PC identifies the drives by manufacturer so I wonder if it might be surprised when it discovered an SSD where there was previously a magnetic drive.

It should be fine. To the best of my knowledge, the bios (uefi on newer machines) will actually identify the drive by its built-in vendor/manufacturer id and unique serial number. These obviously don't change if it moves from one bay to another. The bios may well just display the manufacturer name because thats human-readable.

And I can't think why the bios would particularly care whether a drive is solid-state or magnetic. At the level it deals with the device, its basically just a set of logically addressable blocks of bits irrespective of whether its an SSD or an HDD.  The SATA protocol does expose this information to the bios and the os, but i'm fairly sure the bios wouldn't get surprised by any changes.

Most PCs (as opposed to laptops) will have multiple SATA ports on the motherboard, and the power loom will have spare SATA power plugs. So no additional gadgetry will be required, if you're prepared to open the PC up and plug stuff in. I'd recommend just connecting the SATA power before you power up the PC, then, once it's booted, connect the SATA data cable. Otherwise Windows can see both drives as OS drives, and may ask you which one you want to boot from; if you're cloning a disk, it can get confusing. And my old Win7 machine remembers that it has had multiple OS disks attached, and insists on trying to boot from the one that's no longer there...

For cloning OS HDDs/SSDs, I use Macrium Reflect Free; it can cope with cloning an OS disk between drives of different sizes (provided there's enough space). It's also good for dumping periodic images of the OS/Program HDD as a backup to protect against infection, or damage/corruption of the HDD. Saves lots of tedious mucking around with endless Windows updates if you needed to do a fresh install.

Aha...

Another +1 for macrium reflect, free and simple to use.

Evening. 

I received my ssd today after a fantastic first time in a long time visit to the climbing unit in Derby this afternoon.  Had a great time and managed to get up some v3s for saying I haven't visited for years.

Anyway.   Just not long cloned the old primary hdd and replaced it with the nice 240 gb ssd.  :-D

All super fast and impressive.  I was surprised by how light it was .  Not what I was expecting at all. 

Ive slaved up the old 2tb drive and with my external drives I've got 4 tb of storage aside from the ssd which has doubled my storage at the same time.

Just rebuilding my music studio now all with improved digital audio workstation and plugins.  

what a great day.  

:-D 

Thanks for everyone's help which this.  

TWS