Installing a SSD

[Lurch]

I bought a Dell 960 used / refurb for $50 a while back. It has Win 10 Pro on it, which is OK, but I tend to like my Win 7 Dell GX620 better that has a SanDisk SSD in it.
Now I want to buy an SSD and put it into my Win 10 PC so both of my desktop PCs will be SSD equipped.

I'm thinking about a refurb SanDisk 240 GB SSD on eBay for $36.
Can you briefly tell me how to transfer my data?
Would I transfer it onto my WD external HD and then put it back onto the SSD once it's installed and then format the existing drive to use it as a slave drive?

Thank you and happy, healthy holidays to you all.

[Lurch]

What I think I need to do is get the SATA III SSD, install it physically where the slave HDD is, then transfer the Win10 onto the SSD, then change the SSD to the main drive in the BIOS and possibly change the HDD into the slave, and possibly even put the SSD into where the HDD port had been.

[Philip]

It is a bit more involved than just copying the files... You have to create the same partitions on the new SSD as the old HDD, and you have to copy system/hidden files/partitions for the OS to work correctly. There are a couple of system partitions on Windows 10 machines that you can't even see from the OS, but they are visible through Control Panel\System and Security\Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management. There may be a Dell partition for backups/restores as well.

The easiest way is:

1. Clean up the old hard drive from junk/temp files, etc., you can even disable System Recovery and the Page file temporarily.
2. Try to shrink the OS partition from Disk Management, so all partitions are small enough to fit onto the new SSD
3. Use a free cloning utility software, such as Macrium Reflect, of EaseUS to clone the HDD. You can shrink some of the volumes with newer/better cloning tools.
4. Disconnect the old drive, plug-in just the new SSD, make sure BIOS is set to boot from it, and start the PC.
5. Once everything looks ok, you can hookup your old drive and use it as storage, just make sure that BIOS doesn't use it for booting.

Here is a bit more wordy tutorial: https://www.howtogeek.com/97242/how-...d-state-drive/

Last time I did it I used Macrium Reflect instead of EaseUS, worked fine. The biggest headache is usually being able to shrink the original C: (the OS) volume (and all system partitions) to fit the SSD.

[Lurch]

Thank you Philip. This sounds a bit confusing to me so maybe I'll just get a new SSD at Best Buy and do what I did a few years ago with the new SanDisk SSD I bought there. I can't remember exactly how it went but it's wasn't too complicated. Thanks again for your time.

[Philip]

No problem Some of the SSDs come with their own cloning utility software, I imagine that's what you did with the SanDisk.

[Lurch]

The Win10 Dell 960 has a WD 160 GB HDD. It gets a little sluggish sometimes. I think an SSD in it will do it some good.

[YeOldeStonecat]

Just about all hard drive manufacturers offer a FREE tool you can download to clone an image. Most of those free tools are based on some tweaked version of Acronis...and we use that the most out of any other of the many free cloning tools out there, works the best and is fast. We also have a hardware cloning appliance we use a lot..but for the home user doing this once in a blue moon, the free utilities from the drive manufacturers work great.
It clones the entire volume to the new/destination drive.
It can even "downsize" the partitions..say you have a 750 gig rotating/spindle drive...but you have a 525 gig SSD you want to clone to...as long as the actual "data" (plus about 15% free space) is not larger than the destination SSD...it'll resize/downsize on the fly for you.