SSD and Cloning

So I'm sure this forum has gotten this question several times, in several different forms. I just want to make absolutely sure that I'm not doing anything wrong. (it's better to assume I'm less knowledgeable than I am, than the other way around)

I just got my Intel SSD (thank you babyhemi!), and I want to make it into the primary, booting drive with Windows and all my programs, and open up my Hitachi for storage space.

Simple. All I need to do is download a cloning program (like EaseUs or XXCLONE), pop my SSD in the second open slot in my laptop, run the program, then get up and go make a sandwich. Come back a while later, swap the SSD into the primary slot, and go!

Right? Am I missing anything?

I'm sure you guys get this all the time (and yes I searched), so feel free to answer like, "it's freakin' easy, you dumb()! Can't you read?"

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And once you're done answering that question, I've got a second! Anything I should know with regards to the care and upkeep of my new adopted baby SSD? Tools I need or updates I should do? Again, feel free to use the same answer to this as you no doubt gave to my first question.

Cheers!

 

I don't know much about cloning, but for general maintenance, make sure to grab the Intel SSD Toolbox. It lets you TRIM your drive at your own discretion. Standard MS drivers do automatic trim.

I'm not sure of the exact number, but people say to keep your SSD below 80% filled to keep performance at peak.

And, dammit, I was just going to put mine up for sale. Yeesh.

 

Disable Indexing once installed.

 

Ah-ha! It IS tricky! It is apparently not easy to clone from a larger drive to a smaller one. Even Clonezilla flat out can't do it.

Anyone know the best way around this?

 

I wouldn't recommend cloning and have found that most make the jump with a fresh installation. This guarantees that there is no old garbage/invalid or unneeded registry files/bloatware and trialware on the new system and ensures that you are starting off right.

There are a number of places to find optimizations for your ssd but definitely consider the following:

1. Turn off hibernate. It will gain you back 2.5Gb of ssd storage and serves no purpose really with an ssd that will start in under 20 seconds.

2. TURN OFF SYSTEM RESTORE. We are unsure exactly why as of yet but restore points are devastating on TRIM itself and slow your system down significantly as they increase.

3. Consider shutting down Pagefile if you are wanting to maximize space available and ONLY IF U HAVE SUFFICIENT RAM FOR YOUR SYSTEM USE. I have been without pagefile for 4 years with 4Gb RAM and I have not even once experienced any problem whatsoever....and I am a power user. It will not get you any performance back but will get you 3Gb back.

4. If you do not use search or indexing, shut them down.

Quite frankly, there are a ton of great things you can do to make your system rock solid and at the top of its game if you seek ssd related sites as well as Optimization guides that can assist with what I suggested above.

Good luck.

 

Go into control panel>Administrative tools>Computer Management>Storage.
Select the partition you want to clone and right click. Shrink the volume so that it is smaller than your smaller drive. Once you have cloned it you can extend it out to fill the drive.

 

It appears that I can't shrink my 500GB HDD down past 220GB, while my SSD is 160GB.

Also, I have put a lot of effort into tweaking Windows and my programs, so cloning would save me several hours of work (as well as time downloading, since I have a very slow internet connection, and time looking for disks). There isn't any bloatware (I'm on a Clevo, come on!), and I just installed Windows two months ago, so there's no reason I would want to start from a new installation.

 

no, this is false information

 

If u want to keep ur user settings and most of ur files the same, try using the windows easy transfer wizard

 

I cloned my hard drive to my smaller SSD with Acronis Migration Easy. It simply resizes your partitions for you so that it'll fit on the drive. Performance is great and everything works without issue.

 

I've managed to resize my partition by defragmenting with PerfectDisk 11 and then using Partition Wizard Home Edition to partition (both are Free Trials), so my main partition is now 97GB, which should be able to be cloned onto the SSD.

I ran the cloning software from EaseUs, which wasn't successful - although all my data appeared to be cloned, Windows would not boot from the SSD.

I also tried running XXClone (before I figured out how to resize my partition), since that program supposedly can clone from a larger partition to a smaller one. However, I got a strange error message when it was about 90% complete, and it then tried to copy some files to a floppy drive which I (obviously!) don't have.

I'm loosely following this guide, and so far it seems promising. I'm going to try just using Windows Backup, but if that doesn't work, I'll see if I can try Acronis.

 

Well siince your drive is too big to resize, why not take all the stuff you have on it and save it to another drive so that you can reformat it before using it for storage. Store all the pics, movies, music, documents ect on your 500GB HDD. You don't need that taking up space in an SSD.

 

It wasn't that I had too much stuff on my HDD (I didn't even have 30GB of stuff), it's that Windows defrag keeps some files at the end of the HDD (or in my case, halfway there), which was keeping me from resizing the partition below about half.

But I've fixed that now using 3rd party defragger and partitioner, and my partition is more than small enough.

 

Don't forget about disk alignment. You can't have cloning software create partitions for you unless you know for sure they will be aligned.

 

Using Acronis TrueImage 2010, I am now running on SSD .

I tried using Acronis Migrate Easy, but kept having problems (it wasn't installing right, and it had problems when it tried to make a boot CD). TrueImage seems to have all the functionality of Migrate and then some, so it was able to do what I wanted it to do. I'll let you know if any issues pop up later due to misalignment or not doing a fresh install (and I'll keep my old HDD around for a while before formatting, just in case), but for now, everything seems to be in working order.

Now to start on optimizations... .

Thanks guys!