Most painless way to upgrade primary disk?

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I have a home built desktop system running Win 10, 22H2. It has a 500GB SSD which is the C drive containing the operating system and program files, and two 6TB HDD as the D and E drives for documents, photos, music etc.

In the last few months the available space on the C drive dropped from ~250GB to ~15GB. I found the culprit (a popular flight simulator app) and relocated the resources from the SSD to one of the HDD. Unfortunately that had a significant impact on performance. So I want to swap out the 500GB SSD and replace it (probably with a 2TB SSD from the same manufacturer) so I can put those data files back onto the faster device.

I expect the best advice would be to bite the bullet and do a new O/S and programs install on the new disk, but is there any way I could copy the existing C drive to the new SSD, remove the old SSD and replace it with the new one, and just reboot with the new C drive?

Although the motherboard has slots for two M2 disks, my graphics card blocks the second one so I am limited to using only one.

(perhaps this question belongs in the Hardware forum, I wasn’t sure)

Cheers

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It’s easy to upgrade without reinstalling.

Make an image backup to an external disk (or internal if you have the space).
Make a bootable USB from the backup app.
Test the bootable USB.
Shutdown and swap the new disk in.
Boot from USB and restore to the new disk.
Reboot.

Most backup apps won’t let you resize the disk when you restore, so you may need to use a partition manager to do the job afterwards – I use MiniTool Partition Wizard free.

cheers, Paul

1 user thanked author for this post.

aquatarkus

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I presume if my 2nd M.2 slot WERE available, the procedure would be to CLONE my 1st SSD to my 2nd SSD, correct??

Bill Zigrang

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Zig wrote:

the procedure would be to CLONE

Never use clone. Create full image and restore.

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Paul T wrote:

Most backup apps won’t let you resize the disk when you restore, so you may need to use a partition manager to do the job afterwards – I use MiniTool Partition Wizard free.

I’ve always use the Extend volume function in Windows Disk Management when placing an image on a larger drive if I want to keep the new larger drive as one partition.

HTH, Dana:))

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Assuming you have space to extend the disk. Sometimes the recovery partition is at the end of the disk and then you have to move it to extend C. Windows tools are not good at this.

This is a good reason for taking a full backup. You can replace individual partitions if it goes pear shaped.

cheers, Paul

 

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