Duping my G73sw drive onto an SSD

Yeah, I'm still using my 'old' G73sw! It has one 500gb drive but I'm starting to get tired of the slow boot times and it's getting full (50gb free on C, 80gb free on D), so I'd like to get a 512gb SSD and dup the drive.

What I would like, ideally, is to use my external USB drive duplicator to dup just the C partition from the HD onto the SSD and then expand it to the full size of the SSD. Then blow away (after some testing, naturally) the C partition on the HD and expand the D partition to use the whole HD drive.

I've purchased a second drive caddy already.

I've used the drive duplicator in the past several times, but never using a SSD drive. So my questions are:

1) I've done a 512gb drive to a 1tb drive and used the duplicator, then expanded the partition. It was no real challenge. Should there be any differences using the SSD? I've heard of trim and I'm not sure what that means. (I'm using Win 7 home premium 64 bit).

2) Aside from duping the drive, putting it in the spot my HD occupies now and firing the box back up - is there anything else I need to do?

Lastly, I'm wondering and perhaps this should be a separate thread, but have any of you upgraded (?) your machine from Win7 to Win8 Pro on a upgrade rather than a clean install? I'd rather not do a clean install (apps, blah blah blah). I'd like to do it after the drive install.

Any help y'all can offer would be greatly appreciated. I'd rather not lose the box to a failure from doing this, so any tips or suggestions would be terrific. Like I said, I've used the drive duplicator before and had zero issues. Once, I had a drive failing in a desktop box (the 512->1tb upgrade) and used it IN WINDOWS to dupe the drive, then just swapped the drives following the dupe and it fired up like nothing happened. I'd like the same things to happen here. Am I asking too much?

As an aside....if I do the Win7->Win8 upgrade, can I reuse the Win7 product ID on another box?

 

OK - so it turns out I'm just getting a 256gb SSD instead - so all I need do is clone the drive. I'm pretty sure that will be no problem.

1 - What's this 'trim' setting I keep hearing about?
2- Can I simply put it in the second drive bay and choose which drive is primary boot drive or will it require that it is in the first drive bay?
3 - Any Win8 upgrade suggestions (again, not a clean upgrade)?

 

1. Trim - long answer TRIM vs. Garbage Collection: Beating a dead horse - ssd - Storage . Bottom line if you are running 7 or 8 TRIM will be auto enabled, it keeps the hard drive running efficiently. Another good idea is to partition the hard drive to about 200 GIG or so and leave the rest unallocated to maintain peak performance, there are many discussions here in the SSD portion of the Hardware components section.
Just make sure your C is aligned properly once you do the clone... most here will highly recommend a "clean install" of whatever OS you want to end up with but it can be a lengthy process; which may minimize issue going forward.
What brand SSD are you getting BTW ?

 

OCZ Vertex 4, 256gb.

The HD in there now is 512gb, divided into 186gb C drive and 250gb D drive, plus the smaller partitions. I'm hoping (if I remember right) that the clone software I used (I don't remember the product name, but it came with my hw drive duplicator) lets you first select drive, then deselect partitions. I seem to remember that it does - and if not, I'll buy one that does.

The C partition will be left at 186gb to allow for the recovery partitions to fit and provide some unallocated space, as you suggest.

This alignment issue I've read about - are you suggesting the CURRENT HD-based C drive is aligned prior to cloning - or that the cloned SSD C drive is aligned? Is there a simple way to check? I've read that ensuring your HD-based drive is aligned will result in the SSD-based drive being aligned once cloned.

The G73sw offers UEFI, but in checking today, it's not enabled. Should I enable, once I've cloned and then installed the drive?

Any other tricks? Any suggestions regarding the Win7/Win8 questions?

 

Once you clone the image to the SSD , open windows 7 and http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/Checking_SSD_Alignment ... if the alignment is not correct you can fix it (not recommended) or do a clean install to insure correct alignment.
Also make sure the firmware is up to date for the SSD. OCZ Technology
I am not sure what the advantage of enabling UEFI is.

 

Using EZGigiV for the cloning operation. Drive won't arrive till last day in Feb, so I have time to research.

I've been told that if I format the SSD prior to clone, alignment isn't an issue. Like so much (although it's all true - everything on the internet is true) on the web, there's six thousand different opinions.

So I'm kinda looking for people with experience. Does formatting the SSD prior to cloning assure alignment? If not - is there any tried-n-true method for, prior to cloning, assuring alignment? Anything?

Any other issues I should be aware of? Should I defrag the HD prior? Any prep work? I've not had to do anything before when duping HD -> HD. Just want to make sure.

Again, my plan is:
1) Clone HD -> SSD. This is done using an external, USB cloning device.
2) Place SSD in caddy and replace the HD currently residing in the machine. Since I'm going from 512g to 256g, I won't be cloning the D drive. Once I'm convinced everything is working as it should, I'll expand the D drive to fill the 512g drive.
3) Run my machine as before - but hopefully faster.
Aside from the checking of the alignment following cloning - any other checks to see if things are good?
Any comments on UEFI?