NP9170EM Hard Drive Dilemna

So i've been meaning to upgrade my hard drive capacity for my sager. I currently have the stock 7200rpm 750gb drive. I have a Sata II msata slot and 2 SATA III slots. My plan was to install a 64gb msata as purely a caching drive, and then 2 x 1TB 7200 rpm hitachi drives in RAID 0 to give myself a single large 2tb C: drive and have 64gb msata helping to speed up boot times.

I have close to 500gb of just games on my steam account, all installed to my hdd. All of them have been installed, run, and had their settings optimized. I have also done several other tweaks to my system regarding settings and such and after 6 months of owning the machine, i finally have everything set up jussssssttttt right. Re-installing all games, settings, etc would take me days, soooo

I'm now looking at 2 other options - either a crucial 960gb SSD + 1 TB hitachi OR Samsung 840 500gb + 1tb hitachi. I would like to be able to plug in the new SSD (either crucial or samsung) and Clone my drive, then swap out current HDD for SSD, and then add 1tb hitachi as secondary drive.

I know a fresh install is always the best. I know this, I truly do, but I also know how lazy I am, so i am really trying to avoid it. Here are my concerns/questions

1)Which SSD is easier to clone too (if there is even a difference)
2) What is the best cloning software recommended? Free or otherwise?
3) Will there be any problems attempting to clone my 450-500GB of data on the 750gb HDD to just a 500GB SSD?
4) Will choosing the 840 Pro over the 840 make any difference during the cloning process?

Ultimate goal is to be able to transfer everything I have now to a new drive in the quickest way possible (without having to do a fresh install)

As always, thanks all for the help. Feel free to add your own suggestions.

 

1) Doesn't make a difference when it comes to cloning, although Samsung is generally a bit more reliable than some Crucial drives.
2) More or less up to preference. A lot of people tend to lean towards either CloneZilla or Acronis. But remember that you have to ensure the drive is aligned before attempting to clone!
3) You never really want to fill up a drive all the way, so be sure to calculate your space before you consider it.
4) As far as I know - no. The 840 Pro is a considerably better drive, though; not only in performance, but also in terms of longevity/reliability.

 

Also, all games in Steam can be backed up/restored. It's a fairly simple procedure and it's much faster than installing everything from the scratch. It can be done after fresh installation of Windows. I have done it on my system a number of times.

 

@prostar, thanks. I've read about the aligning, but it seems like msot of the cloning software gives you the option of checking a box for cloning to an SSD, which automatically aligns everything. Am i missing something?

@Marecki, i know i can get everything from steam again, but quite frankly it is the actual time it will take to redownload everything that is the issue. Despite a high speed connection and trying every possible configuration with steam settings i could try, I still only download around 3mbps.

 

You don't need to re-download anything. Steam allows backing up/restoring games on an external HDD. That's what I had in mind.

 

i see what youre saying. I am assuming if i just make a clone of my drive, properly aligned, it will just be plug and play on the new drive. I'm still trying to figure out how to make sure i do the alignment properly and which software to use. Has anyone else cloned using a samsung drive?