SSD upgrade

guil

I have a 450ish GB SSD in a caddy that I was using a bit just as an external. Hasn't been used much and I'm thinking of putting it in my pc.

I tried cloning it this evening but I've read before that it's not a great idea to clone an SSD from HDD but I was curious.

What's the best way to go about it?

enryb12

guil wrote: »

I have a 450ish GB SSD in a caddy that I was using a bit just as an external. Hasn't been used much and I'm thinking of putting it in my pc.

I tried cloning it this evening but I've read before that it's not a great idea to clone an SSD from HDD but I was curious.

What's the best way to go about it?

I've cloned many HDDs to SSDs and never had an issue. If the SSD has been used as an external up to now, just make sure its formatted to correct format ie. GPT or MBR

guil

Now you have me lost, is there any easy to follow guides? I'm sure MBT is master boot partition but no idea of the other.

enryb12

guil wrote: »

Now you have me lost, is there any easy to follow guides? I'm sure MBT is master boot partition but no idea of the other.

Yep you are correct, may have not worded my original post correctly!

I'll have a look for decent guide and link you. 90% of the time it is as simple as just cloning from HDD to SSD and itst done.

guil

I used a program to do it last night but not sure if it worked correctly althought I didn't format the entire SSD, there is two partitions on it but one was blank.

guil

Think I hit a snag, cloned the hd and booted on the SSD but it seems the h61 choosey doesn't support ahci. Boot times is as bad as the HDD.

is the hdd still in situ

guil

It's still there but not connected at all. I just connected the SSD to the existing SATA and power cables.

approx specs on the hp61, and how long was boot before?

guil

It's a Dell optiplex 390, think the mobo is m5o5d.
I suppose boot time would be maybe 2 minutes or so. I used this SSD in a Dell Inspiron laptop before and brought the boot time from over 1.5 minutes down to a little over 20 seconds.

dell.com/community/desktops-general-read-only/optiplex-390-booting-from-ssd-not-possible/td-p/5096251


first response is informative if a little negative, worth looking at options in the thread tho

guil

That's a whole mouthful of info haha. Thanks anyway. I was going to try install windows from a usb drive as that is what I done with the laptop but not sure if there is any point. Nothing to lose anyway.

guil

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm an absolute moron and almost too embarrassed to say what happened.

The drive I was using was the old hd out of the laptop and the SSD was still in the laptop. I'm doing a new install on the actual SSD this time.

The Black Oil

How'd it go?

Thinking of doing this. Haven't ordered anything yet. The current HDD is partitioned. Not sure if this carries over. Acronis seems to be recommended, I've not cloned a drive before. Guess I could upgrade and just leave the old HDD in for larger files, boot from the SSD. Did you've to order a cable to connect the HDD and SSD to copy stuff?

guil

I used Macrium and it worked fine other than the hiccup above haha. It will literally make an exact copy of what way your hd is now and put that on the SSD. In the end I just did a fresh install of windows using MS creation tool on a USB stick. Drives don't need to be connected together just to the mobo or else have the new one in a caddy beforehand.

I have the SSD connected to the same sata that the original HDd was in and a 500gb HDD is connected to another sata that was going to my DVD drive. I moved that on the mobo as I wasn't sure if it would work right in the port it was in.