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F6Dave
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« on: July 29, 2020, 05:16:34 PM » |
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I write software for a living, but when it comes to hardware I'm a novice. I'm upgrading a hard drive to an SSD the lazy way, by cloning the disk, and want to know what cloning software I should use. I've read that EaseUS is pretty good. The new SSD is a Samsung, so I could use theirs, but it gets mediocre reviews. Does anyone have experience doing this?
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F6Dave
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« Reply #2 on: July 29, 2020, 05:39:51 PM » |
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It's a laptop without a spare drive bay, so I got a 2.5" drive enclosure for about $30. It has a SATA connection on the inside and connects to the PC via USB 3. Hooked it up to the PC and it was recognized. I initialized it as an MBR disk, same as the current HDD.
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Serk
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« Reply #3 on: July 29, 2020, 05:42:05 PM » |
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It's a laptop without a spare drive bay, so I got a 2.5" drive enclosure for about $30. It has a SATA connection on the inside and connects to the PC via USB 3. Hooked it up to the PC and it was recognized. I initialized it as an MBR disk, same as the current HDD.
The cloning software should override any initializing you've done. Don't partition the SSD, that'll make the cloning software angry (Most fill throw up an error if it looks like you're overwriting existing data.) If the Samsung software is gratis, give it a whirl and see if it works, it's pretty much a binary proposition, it'll either work or it won't... :0 |
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Never ask a geek 'Why?',just nod your head and slowly back away...  IBA# 22107 VRCC# 7976 VRCCDS# 226 1998 Valkyrie Standard 2008 Gold Wing Taxation is theft. μολὼν λαβέ |
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Rio Wil
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« Reply #4 on: July 29, 2020, 05:44:38 PM » |
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If at least one of the drives is a seagate, download seagates free disk management tool and do the clone.
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scooperhsd
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« Reply #5 on: July 29, 2020, 06:44:43 PM » |
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The mechanics of cloning a drive are as straight forward as Serk laid out. Where I get in trouble is doing the physical swapping of the drives and not ending up with "spare parts" - at least on a laptop. A desktop, however, is a piece of cake to do - I wouldn't say I could do it blindfolded, but I could do it and have no "spare parts" leftover.
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Ramie
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« Reply #6 on: July 29, 2020, 07:13:33 PM » |
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The only SSD drives I've used are Samsung so I always use Samsung magician. I've never had a problem.
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“I am not a courageous person by nature. I have simply discovered that, at certain key moments in this life, you must find courage in yourself, in order to move forward and live. It is like a muscle and it must be exercised, first a little, and then more and more. A deep breath and a leap.”
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Robert
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« Reply #7 on: July 29, 2020, 08:00:38 PM » |
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Super easy if you buy a Samsung drive with the usb adapter and Samsung has a cloning software that is exactly for the transfer of drives to SSD. Its free and easy to use and fairly fast. So with the USB adapter you don't have to mount the drive in the computer if you don't want to. The other is Casper, I like it because it makes an exact clone, easy to use, can do incremental backups and works. I have transferred quite a few with both and no problem at all. It does all the work for you for partitions and makes an exact copy. All you have to do is disconnect one drive and plug the new transferred drive in. It does maintain a Bootable Backup Replacement for Instant Recovery, too in case. https://www.fssdev.com/products/casper/ I always keep a copy of my drive as insurance against catastrophe and the Casper makes it easy to do. Neither one will it matter what you have done with the drives. Both format and repartitions the drives, you may have to initialize them though, I don't remember, just so as the drive will be recognized in Windows. |
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« Last Edit: July 29, 2020, 08:11:28 PM by Robert »
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“Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.”
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0leman
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« Reply #8 on: July 30, 2020, 07:48:34 AM » |
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Dang I feel that I have been left behind in the tech world. 11 years after retiring as a Systems Admin, I think I have lost all my knowledge in the computer world or at least its gone past where I was at back then. I do agree in working with laptops having parts left over was the big problem, especially when it it works without them. Glad to hear that there is folks like you guy out there on the board so I can ask questions when my laptop does the big bump.  |
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2006 Shadow Spirit 1100 gone but not forgotten
1999 Valkryie I/S Green/Silver
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The emperor has no clothes
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« Reply #9 on: July 30, 2020, 07:56:50 AM » |
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Dang I feel that I have been left behind in the tech world. 11 years after retiring as a Systems Admin, I think I have lost all my knowledge in the computer world or at least its gone past where I was at back then. I do agree in working with laptops having parts left over was the big problem, especially when it it works without them. Glad to hear that there is folks like you guy out there on the board so I can ask questions when my laptop does the big bump. I was a Data Systems Tech in the Navy. (Maintained and repaired computers, tape to tape, card readers) The system I was trained on was a UYK-5. It was nearly as big as a VW bus. Time has passed me by.  |
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Robert
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« Reply #10 on: July 30, 2020, 09:00:50 AM » |
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I really like the M2 drives they are about as big as a stick of gum and have up 3 tb of storage on them. The new build I just did will boot in under 5 seconds to a fully usable screen and there are no moving parts.  Recently bought a M2 1 tb drive, bought an external case and now have a 1tb usb 3.1 drive that is just a bit bigger than a stick of gum but the cord is more bulky than the drive, about 1/4 the size of a ssd drive. Leverage sequential read/write performance up to 5000/4400MB/s, and randomread/write up to 760K/700K IOPS. MTBF 1,800,000 hours Much more durable than the normal spin disk backup Partition the drive and now have a usb backup clone for 2 computers plus some storage space at a fairly high speed, that will store well and takes up as much space as a pack of gum. |
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« Last Edit: July 30, 2020, 09:17:53 AM by Robert »
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“Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.”
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CajunRider
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« Reply #11 on: July 30, 2020, 10:44:36 AM » |
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I haven't tried the EaseUs Cloning yet...
But their backup software and Partition software both work pretty well and are easy to figure out.
For a free software, I've been VERY impressed.
I also use a paid version of Acronis Workstation for work. Definitely more powerful than the free EaseUs (for obvious reasons), but not by a whole lot.
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Sent from my Apple IIe
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scooperhsd
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« Reply #12 on: July 30, 2020, 02:26:04 PM » |
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Today I bought a Samsung 1TB SSD to replace the 1TB HD (5400 RPM) that my new laptop came with. MicroCenter didn't have the Sabrent cable, but they had a couple different others that I bought.
samsung.com/magician takes you to a multipurpose webpage, with multiple sections for download. downloading Magician itself did not provide the disk cloning software - that was a separate piece of software to download, and THAT did the cloning - painlessly. Took about 40 minutes to do the cloning. The job of replacing the drive will be done later - probably by my wife (she's a lot more patience than me working on these *&*^*%^* laptops and won't have the spare parts issue when done).
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Robert
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« Reply #13 on: July 30, 2020, 03:11:53 PM » |
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Today I bought a Samsung 1TB SSD to replace the 1TB HD (5400 RPM) that my new laptop came with. MicroCenter didn't have the Sabrent cable, but they had a couple different others that I bought.
samsung.com/magician takes you to a multipurpose webpage, with multiple sections for download. downloading Magician itself did not provide the disk cloning software - that was a separate piece of software to download, and THAT did the cloning - painlessly. Took about 40 minutes to do the cloning. The job of replacing the drive will be done later - probably by my wife (she's a lot more patience than me working on these *&*^*%^* laptops and won't have the spare parts issue when done).
It will seem as if you supercharged your computer especially from a 5400 drive. |
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“Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.”
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scooperhsd
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« Reply #14 on: July 30, 2020, 05:40:46 PM » |
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Today I bought a Samsung 1TB SSD to replace the 1TB HD (5400 RPM) that my new laptop came with. MicroCenter didn't have the Sabrent cable, but they had a couple different others that I bought.
samsung.com/magician takes you to a multipurpose webpage, with multiple sections for download. downloading Magician itself did not provide the disk cloning software - that was a separate piece of software to download, and THAT did the cloning - painlessly. Took about 40 minutes to do the cloning. The job of replacing the drive will be done later - probably by my wife (she's a lot more patience than me working on these *&*^*%^* laptops and won't have the spare parts issue when done).
It will seem as if you supercharged your computer especially from a 5400 drive. The rest of my new laptop is a rocket ship - 16 GB RAM (I had 8GB more put in the day I bought it), AMD Ryzen 5 CPU, Radeon Vega Graphics, GB ethernet, Pretty much state of the art WiFI,and all 3 USB ports are USB 3 / 3.1 ( 2 of them same size as USB 2 / 1.1, other one USB-C). I'm expecting this to get me by for the next 5-7 years . Last piece of the puzzle - Upgrade from Win10 Home to WIn10 Pro, as well as MS Office Home so we can use OneDrive for offsite backups in a reasonable quantity. |
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F6Dave
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« Reply #15 on: July 30, 2020, 06:22:48 PM » |
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I just went to the Samsung website and found the Magician, which has lots of utilities but not the cloning software. On the same page was a link to their 'Data Migration Software'. I assume that's the cloning program so I downloaded it along with the manual. Need to do some reading so I don't screw something up. I want the SSD to be a bootable clone so I don't have to reinstall anything.
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scooperhsd
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« Reply #16 on: July 30, 2020, 06:52:12 PM » |
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Well, for me (an experianced IT support tech) - no reading required. Basically don't do anything during the cloning process (no open apps / files on the source drive , don't disconnect the target drive while cloning, etc.). Pretty standard stuff for low-level disc drive utilities.
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Robert
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« Reply #17 on: July 30, 2020, 07:42:35 PM » |
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I'm expecting this to get me by for the next 5-7 years . 5 to 7 years, good luck with that.  The biggest improvement will be the drive, I was amazed at how much faster mine was the first time I did that. I bet you your boot time will be down to about 15 seconds, maybe 10. Data migration is the tool just load and run pretty much. Its pretty easy to do and it works pretty well. BTW surfing the web will be faster also since web pages load on the drive. |
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« Last Edit: July 31, 2020, 05:51:18 AM by Robert »
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“Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.”
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scooperhsd
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« Reply #18 on: July 31, 2020, 06:15:26 AM » |
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5-7 years - as long as I don't take it apart put it back together multiple times - no problem. I've an OLD Dell Inspiron 1720 that came with 3 GB RAM and it's original OS was Windows Vista. In the last couple weeks, I upgraded the BIOS ( to something made in 2009) and I successfully upgraded it to Win 10 Pro (32 Bit). After I did a disk cleanup to remove the Window 7 stuff, it's not too bad, so long as you don't try to run too much at once.
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Robert
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« Reply #19 on: July 31, 2020, 09:15:48 AM » |
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5-7 years - as long as I don't take it apart put it back together multiple times - no problem. I've an OLD Dell Inspiron 1720 that came with 3 GB RAM and it's original OS was Windows Vista. In the last couple weeks, I upgraded the BIOS ( to something made in 2009) and I successfully upgraded it to Win 10 Pro (32 Bit). After I did a disk cleanup to remove the Window 7 stuff, it's not too bad, so long as you don't try to run too much at once.
There is a program that someone wrote that removes all the bloat and report ware in windows 10. I will try to find it and post it, but there is also Revo uninstaller that uninstalls some of the native 10 useless programs and can get it sped up a bit more. 10 comes native with Xbox installed and I dont use it so I removed it but there were about 8 or 9 other programs I removed and shut down and sped it up a bit. You can shut these programs down but they still run. |
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“Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.”
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scooperhsd
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« Reply #20 on: July 31, 2020, 02:05:59 PM » |
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SSD installed - yes it boots much faster. |
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scooperhsd
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« Reply #21 on: July 31, 2020, 03:05:57 PM » |
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Hard to improve on my web browsing - I have 500 Mbps up and down Google Fiber 1Gbps is available if I thought I needed it. |
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F6Dave
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« Reply #22 on: August 05, 2020, 07:28:29 AM » |
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That was easy! I finally got around to cloning to the new SSD last night, and installed it this morning. It was nearly effortless, except for me complicating it more than I needed to. I ran a full backup of the old drive first, then a CHKDSK and system file check. That took some time, but minimized the chances of something going wrong, and gave me a good backup if something did.
I was also concerned that the Samsung Data Migration tool wouldn't copy the OEM recovery partition on non-Samsung PCs, since that's technically software piracy. So I looked at two other cloning tools. Both had free versions, but with significant features removed. One wouldn't let you upsize a cloned partition for a larger target drive, while the other didn't let you clone to a target drive in a USB connected SATA enclosure. So I stuck with the Samsung tool and it worked flawlessly. It was fast, too. I cloned over 1/2 TB of data in under 2 hours.
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scooperhsd
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« Reply #23 on: August 05, 2020, 07:39:26 AM » |
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Once you have cloned your hard drive to the SSD and then installed the SSD into your computer, you can use Windows Disk Management Snapin to adjust partition sizes.
And yes, the cloning operation went very quickly.
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F6Dave
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« Reply #24 on: August 05, 2020, 08:03:48 AM » |
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Thanks for all the help from everyone! The performance improvement is great!
This is an older PC still running Windows 7 with extended security support. It was a high end (at the time) i7 machine that still runs fine. I keep it around because it has some old software authoring tools I still use to support systems I wrote years ago. These tools include two old versions of Microsoft Visual Studio that would be a bear to get running on my Windows 10 PC. I was getting nervous about the old hard drive and backing up at least weekly. Now I won't worry so much.
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« Last Edit: August 05, 2020, 08:30:39 AM by F6Dave »
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