good things

[heresluck]

1. I just swapped out my old (well, okay, not THAT old) SSD boot drive on the vidding computer for a higher-capacity drive and it was without doubt the least stressful, most hassle-free computer upgrade I have EVER done. Cloning and installation took less than 45 minutes. Good job, Samsung.

2. Doing the swap involved opening up the case for the

Comments

[vonniek]

I'm just about to upgrade my own hard drive as well, which is about 5-6 years old and showing the sign of its age. I've actually never upgraded a still-functional hard drive before! (I did build the one I have from scratch, but with a lot of phone calls to my brother, the tech guru in my family. :)) I've been looking around for different ways of doing it, and cloning seems the way to go rather than imaging according to this article at least. Both the old and the new drives are SATA HDDs.

Before I attempt this, I'm trying to clean up the hard drive, especially the folder with all my music, which is riddled with duplicates and songs I no longer listen to. Oy. That's gonna take a while... ANYWAY, I wanted to ask, which program did you use to do the cloning? There appear to be a bunch of options, both paid and free, and I'd take a rec from someone who's just successfully upgraded hers painlessly. :)

[heresluck]

I was going to use Macrium Reflect (the free edition), which I use for lots of things (including backups, system recovery USB sticks, etc), but it turned out that the drive I got came with its own cloning software, so I used that out of curiosity and it went off without a hitch.

I should mention here that I was *only* cloning the boot drive; this is my vidding machine, so it actually has four hard drives: the SSD boot drive with the OS and all programs; a HD data drive for documents, music, TV downloads, etc.; and two dedicated vidding drives.

IDK what your setup is, but the process is the same regardless: Plug the new drive into a USB port (you'll need an adapter cable), clone the old drive to it (whether using Macrium, proprietary software, or some other cloning utility), open up the case and swap drives, and you should be good to go.

[vonniek]

Awesome, this is very helpful! Right now, my setup is 2 HDD, 1TB each, the first of which is partitioned into a boot drive with OS, a system recovery drive, and a data drive containing some downloaded videos, with the second 1TB one containing all my documents and music and a bunch of other videos. For replacement drives, I just bought 2 HDDs from Amazon (1TB + 2TB, still in their anti-static wrap!) and.... you know what? This conversation prompted me into doing some research into SSD vs. HDD, and I might have just talked myself into returning the 1TB drive in exchange for a 250GB SDD. I'm eying the exact model you've got, actually. :) The price point is not too bad. I'll check out the Macrium Reflect, but if the drive comes bundled with a cloning software, that's even better!

I'm still hesitant to tinker with the computer innards even after building one, but you learn by doing I guess!

[heresluck]

Oh, if you haven't switched to SSD boot drive, I *really* recommend it -- the difference in boot time, program load time, and general responsiveness was huge for me.

The easiest way to upgrade, then, would probably be to clone the documents/music drive to the new 2TB drive (the Samsung software would not work for this, FYI, and you would need a different transfer cable for HDD-to-USB) and then transfer all the data from the current boot drive to the new 2TB drive as well, then clear the excess data from the current boot drive (so it's just OS and software) and clone it to the new SSD.

I totally know what you mean about being reluctant to tinker, but as someone who's learned-by-doing for basically everything I know about computers, upgrading drives is not hard! I mean, there are a lot of fiddly steps, so it wouldn't necessarily be a FAST process, but nothing about it is especially tricky.