Posted March 14, 2015 I was looking for some advice guys So i have a MSI GT60 laptop, and i'm planning on adding some more RAM (putting me up to 24gb) and while i'm taking the back off, i thought i might finally get around to installing a second hard drive When i bought it there was some different spec models that came with a SSD boot drive, so that is my intention I think i've settled on a 480gb one on Ebuyer (although i'm debating a 240gb one not convinced i need all that space, i could switch the 750gb one to a 1tb hybrid at a later date), and i'm looking to clone the operating system and many many files to the new SSD, only i've never cloned a drive before A fresh install is probably out of the question, i never got windows 8 disks with the computer, only software to make a back up/restore disks and that won't do the job Has anyone done it before? Is it relatively pain free? Are there any issues with the cloning process? Is there any Free or paid software people would recommend? for reference HERE is my laptop spec - as a note, its the 750gb hard drive, and the graphics card was the better 675MX DDR5 version It's This Hard drive i'm probably getting or maybe this if i go for the lower option (the benefit being i may spend the saved money on another Vengence ram chip and up it to 32GB) Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted March 15, 2015 I cloned my hard drive a couple of times when I upgraded my laptop, and it is pretty easy i thought. In definitely used free software to do it, but can't remember exactly what it was called... maybe EaseUs or EaseToDo or something? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted March 15, 2015 Cool I'm sure I saw one of those names on a tech site as recommended software! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted March 15, 2015 If your current drive is an HDD then make sure to enable TRIM on your SSD after you clone your drive http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/39569-trim-support-ssd-check-enable-disable.html. I'd say do a fresh install if you have the licence key. You just to download the iso from somewhere. Also I recommended going for the larger drive, always better to have more storage in my eyes. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted March 16, 2015 If your current drive is an HDD then make sure to enable TRIM on your SSD after you clone your drive http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/39569-trim-support-ssd-check-enable-disable.html. I'd say do a fresh install if you have the licence key. You just to download the iso from somewhere. Also I recommended going for the larger drive, always better to have more storage in my eyes. I'm pretty certain it never came with the licence key, but i'll dig out the manuals and look through the emails when i bought it (from ebuyer aswell) Think i'm going to order the larger drive then, i haven't found a single person who's thought a smaller drive was worth it when the larger is £50 more Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted March 29, 2015 Just to update this for anyone interested Managed to complete the cloning over the past day my original drive was partitioned into C drive (400gb), D Drive (325gb), and three hidden drives I backed up all the data off of D drive and removed the partition and merged with C Drive, cut all the my documents etc onto my back up and began the cloning process It randomly cloned the drive but partitioned in another drive as if that D drive was still there, so i had to download easeUS partition manager as the windows one wouldn't let my move partitions, so once i removed the erroneous drive i couldn't expand the new OS drive. Once i had that sorted shut down, boot from the SSD and it all worked. Formatted the original drive, and optimized the SSD Went from about a min to go from power button pressed to working windows, to approx 20 seconds, could be far quicker but typing in my password takes about 3/4 seconds! Monitoring Task manager before and after, my old Hitachi HDD would go to 100% usage and cause the slow down when booting windows, the SSD goes no higher than 40% (briefly) before dropping off to around 1% All in all a success i think. With my Laptop i do have one issue i wonder if i want to try and sort; the MSI GT60 has to hdd bays (obviously), however there is conflicting information on the speed of the drives, supposedly one is Sata3 6bb/s the other is Sata 2 3gb/s - the spare port i used for the SSD "could" be the Sata 2 and potentially offer slower read/write speeds. After looking on the MSI forums it is further complicated by the multitude of variations of the GT60! some earlier versions had this set up, others had both ports as Sata 3 - and Sod's law mine was in the purgatory where it could be either sata 2 or 3 depending on the exact manufacturing date! I opened her up when both drives were identical (data wise) and switched the ports of the drives, and it wouldn't boot, the BIOS registered them :shrug: at the time i couldn't be bothered sorting that so switched them back I'm not sure whether it is worth switching ports again (or trying) i don't want to screw it up and so far i've got the performance gains i wanted My issue is, i just don't fully understand if it will make any noticeable difference, or what i'd need to do to make it work, i think it should be plug and play but it wasn't so fear makes me think the status quo is fine for now, until i fully understand whats going on Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
