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  2. Thinking about a solid state C-drive

Re: Thinking about a solid state C-drive

Carlos
 

You can use a vacant drive bay/available SATA connection, but you can also use a USB enclosure to perform the cloning or imaging procedure.  The SSD will not automatically become the boot drive, but it is not usually necessary to make any changes in the BIOS.  Just swap the data cables and or the bays of the two drives so that the SSD is on controller 0 and it should become the default boot disk.

----- Original Message -----
From: Walt Smith
Sent: Monday, February 01, 2016 11:27 AM
Subject: Re: [TechTalk] Thinking about a solid state C-drive

Carlos -
 
Thanks -- looks like very good advice, as usual. From what you say, I take it that I would install the solid state drive into a vacant drive bay (pretty sure I have one on this system) and perform the drive cloning or imaging directly from the existing C-drive. What happens at this point: that is, does the SSD then become the boot drive or what? Do I have to have someone sighted help me monkey with the BIOS settings in order to change the pointer to the boot drive? Can I then remove the mechanical drive? Thanks for clarifications here.

From: Carlos [mailto:carlos1106@...]
Sent: Monday, February 01, 2016 11:19 AM
To: TechTalk@groups.io
Subject: Re: [TechTalk] Thinking about a solid state C-drive

The only major consideration which immediately occurs to me is capacity.  Take a close look at the occupied space on your current drive, not including data files to determine what size you will probably need.  250/256 GB capacity models are now reasonably priced.  You should use a mechanical drive to store your data files.  I'm not sure why you're under the impression that you will have to reinstall Windows and all of your applications.  Of course you can do that if you like, but it is a more common practice to either clone your existing drive on to the SSD or create an image of your current drive and restore it on to the SSD.  Either procedure will include your complete Windows installation and all of your applications.  Most SSDs come with some kind of software to migrate everything on to the new drive, but it might or might not be accessible.  For cloning I would recommend Casper
and for imaging I would recommend Image for Windows
or Drive Snapshot.
Image for Windows might be more convenient for migrating to an SSD since it is probably better at automatically duplicating all necessary boot/partition table sectors.
 
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