Upgrade 2: The Clone
A clean install is a common request from our customers, but most SSD upgrades involves cloning the existing drive. It’s a more attractive proposition as all files, settings and apps are retained and the customer always prefers to return home with a turbo-charged version of their old machine.
There are many ways to perform this procedure, so I’ll show you my favourite, but it involves drive caddies. A caddy will connect the new SSD to the laptop’s USB port so the software can read from one drive and write to the other. If you remember the 80s, it’s press play on one tape whilst pressing record on the other. I’d recommend the £14 Startech SATA to USB cable ( pcpro.link/324star) for SATA SSDs and a fabulous £22 tool ( pcpro.link/324fideco) from Fideco that handles SATA and
NVMe M.2 SSDs at up to 10Gbits/ sec. Irrespective of this project, these are great products to own.
Macrium to the rescue
Many SSDs come with some software to help with the cloning process but if yours doesn’t, Macrium Reflect ( macrium.com/reflectfree) will do the job. Although Reflect 7 Free is indeed free for home users, you’ll only receive it in exchange for an email address. Download from the link that arrives and install onto the machine.
Our upgrade is the 250GB Samsung Evo 870 Pro SATA SSD, but as we’re coming from a 1TB SATA hard disk, a restriction of the free Macrium is that it doesn’t automatically clone a larger capacity drive to a smaller one, so we will show you how to work around that. If you’re upgrading to a larger SSD (why not!), keep reading.
Start the machine and connect the new SSD to a USB port. Open Macrium and check that both drives are visible. The top drive, Drive A, is the existing disk, broken down into partitions, and Drive B is underneath and empty.
Under Drive A, select “Clone this disk”. Click “Select a disk to clone to” and Drive B will appear so click it. Now it’s time for the magic. Alongside each of the partitions of Drive A is a ticked checkbox. Remove the ticks then drag the first partition from Drive A to Drive B. Repeat this process but stop after you’ve moved the largest partition, the C drive.
Macrium shows that our GPL partition size is 930GB but only 56GB is used, so we’ll eject a lot of that unused space to squeeze everything onto this smaller SSD. Select the C drive partition from Drive B then click Cloned Partition Properties. This window allows us to shrink the partition size, but by how much? If you move this window over, you’ll glimpse the remaining partitions on Drive A and also how big they are. On the GPL drive, our last partition is only 516MB in size, so I type 517 (to round up) into the Free Space and click OK.
Macrium will make a small size adjustment (don’t panic!), leaving enough room to drag down the final partition from Drive A to Drive B. Fits like a glove.
Click Advanced Options, make sure that SSD TRIM is ticked and click OK. Finally, click Finish, untick the box next to “Save backup and schedules as XML” and click OK. The clone won’t finish in ten minutes (our GPL took 48 minutes), but you’ll have a fully working SSD that’s a much faster bit-by-bit clone of your existing drive.
I’ve deliberately chosen the small drive to fabricate this scenario, but with SSD prices dropping, you can save yourself from these shenanigans by size-matching your new drive to the old one. If you want to move from a small drive to a larger one, then just increase the size of Drive B’s “C” drive (using Partition Size) until there’s just enough room for the final partition from Drive A to slot alongside.
This free version of Macrium will get the job done, but there are other cost-effective pieces of software that automatically resize the partitions if a different sized SSD is being installed.
Macrium Reflect 8 Home Edition ( macrium.com/products/home) costs around £50 and is also useful as a backup tool. Another favourite is AOMEI’s Backupper Professional
( ubackup.com/buy-ab-pro.html) that has similar features to Macrium and is priced at just over £40.
Looking after your SSD
Although SSDs are fantastic, they can fail just like any other mass-produced piece of electronics. Backup is vital because data recovery can be far more complicated (and expensive) than with traditional SATA hard drives. To help optimise and monitor your SSD, download the management software from the manufacturer’s website. The GPL’s Samsung uses Magician ( pcpro.
link/324sam), but I like HD Sentinel Professional ( hdsentinel.com), which costs around £30. If you’re unlucky enough to have a problem, advanced warning is always welcome.