SDD upgrade, clone or fresh install?

[T i m]

Peeps,

Following on from the Digital Audio Workstation / laptop question previously, we have since found a s/h i5 HP Notebook that seems to run Reason 11 ok. It came with a 750GB hdd that I'd like to swap out for a SSD (a new 500GB Samsung 860 EVO is sitting here ready).

Now, I think I read somewhere that if you clone a std HDD onto a SSD you may not get the optimum configuration, compared with allowing W10 to partition the drive from scratch itself. This is down to partition / block boundaries or some such? [1]

So, whilst this is a pretty fresh re-install of W10, she's taken it to school the last couple of days and has to get the school IT dept to put it online.

Now, if a fresh install (that is potentially going to be running for a while, especially if she goes onto UNI etc) could give better results than cloning, I might as well do that, even if she has to 'bother' school IT again.

Thoughts please?

Cheers, T i m

[1] Or can you re-configure such things post cloning, with Gparted or the like?

[jrwalliker]

The main issue is that your SSD is smaller than the HD, so you will need to shrink the last partition before you clone it. I have successfully cloned a couple of Windows 7 systems to Samsung 860 Pro drives using DD running on a USB bootable linux. It may not be the optimal method, but the results are good. Getting the computer "online" at the school often means installing the school spyware and a certificate for their proxy server so that they can inspect all the encrypted traffic. Some monitoring may take place even when the computer is out of the school. Any removable media attached to the computer are also likely to get scanned and "anomalies" reported. Schools have draconian legal powers for doing such things.

John

[Brian Gaff (Sofa)]

I would imagine the school would be on a loser if you removed all but security software from it, as after all its not their machine, is it?

Brian

[T i m]

<snip>

Understood. Luckily the drive is fairly empty so it won't be a capacity issue and most of the partitioning tools seem to be able to allow for a resize on the fly (Acronis / Ghost etc).

I've seen some good words on the Samsung migration tool so I might give that a look as well.

I'm not confident enough with the CLI to be able to do such.

Ah.

Crafty.

Oooerr!

Are there any things we could look for to check? Proxy server settings in network properties or wouldn't it be that obvious?

Cheers, T i m

[Martin Brown]

You won't notice the performance hit for block boundaries but you should reconfigure the cloned disk to know that it is an SSD so that windows won't do silly things to speed up spinning rust that slow down an SSD. I think Win10 gets it right by default but earlier Windoze didn't.

Be prepared for eventual failure - SSDs when they go wrong leave you with no access at all to any data. Rare but not completely unknown. Backups of work in progress is a very good idea...

You can clone it across provided that the content of the old disk will fit on the new one and then run one of the tools to check and optimise the configuration. Samsung's disk magician is pretty good.

EVOs can just about saturate a SATA 6G link so if you have an interface capable of that speed or better it is worth putting the SSD on it.

[Chris Hogg]

I've recently done something similar. I had a 240GB SSD available in a little USB caddy, that I plugged into this computer, cloned the 150GB HDD to it using Acronis, took it out and replaced it with the SSD, and it powered up pretty much as before (rather to my surprise, I must say. IME if anything can go wrong when messing with the insides of a computer, it will!). Then I re-formatted the HDD to remove everything on it and put it back, to give me an additional 150GB for whatever I choose. Had to tell the BIOS that I was using two discs, but apart from that, all is now working perfectly AFAICT. But replacing a 150GB HDD by a 240GB SSD may have made the swap easier than if it were the other way round - I don't know.

But I'm delighted the way it all zings along now; much faster than before!

[T i m]

<snip>

Ok, thanks.

Noted. I think I've been though most of that before but a handy recap.

Quite.

Sure. I'm going to put the 750GB drive I take out in a USB3 caddy and see if my ClickFree dongle backs up everything she would consider important.

I've set up another PC on that network to backup automatically to the OMV NAS and that in turn backs itself up when you plug in a USB drive. I might look into some cloud storage for them as well.

<snip>

Check. Brand new W10 install with just the Reason 11 DAW so pretty empty.

Interesting, thanks.

If I were doing it for myself, I'd be tempted to do a fresh install to the new SSD with it in it's proper place, not in a caddy and then swapping over.

Not sure I've got a choice on this Notebook Martin. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[John Rumm]

That only really applies to partitions created under WinXP or earlier. Vista onward has always aligned things on boundaries that match Advanced Format drives.

Clone it, it should be fine.

[John Rumm]

Acronis will shrink on the fly (and most of the drive specific tools are rebadged versions of Acronis IME)

That should ring alarm bells on any modern web browser - the site certificates would no longer match.

[Andy Burns]

Get the domain controller to push out the root CA certificate that the proxy fakes the website certificates from ... I hate doing it, but nobody seems to like my suggestion not to MITM their users online banking any more :-(

[PeterC]

With mine (Samsung 950 Pro, SATA) I cloned it with Macrium Reflect, disconnected the HDD and it booted straight away. ISTR having to do a couple of things (BIOS?) first. This was a couple of years or so ago and the MoBo was just OK with last BIOS issued. I also got a driver so that I could try a NVMe one, but it boots to useable in 35s even with all the things that run at start.

[jrwalliker]

NVMe really is nice and much faster than SATA. I tried one (Samsung 970 PRO 512GB M.2) in an HP ML110 Gen7 server with a

4-lane PCIe adapter card recently. I couldn't boot from NVMe, even with a BIOS update from this year, so the boot partition had to go on a spinning disk and everything else on the NVMe. I could have used a SATA SSD to boot from of course, but didn't have a spare to hand. Read and write speeds were limited by the PCIe v2 on the motherboard.

John

[T i m]

<snip>

It's good when that happens eh. ;-)

In many cases I'm the opposite. In my years of IT support I would go to a users machine that was reported as 'playing up', have them demonstrate the problem to me, only to it work perfectly (of course). ;-)

Yeah, I think I'll do the same with the 750G that's in there atm.

Unless someone had turned off automatic support for any unused ports, it should have picked them up automatically. Could it have just been the boot sequence, the PC trying to boot from the original drive?

If the migration / cloning tool can't support that, or if you had more data on the drive than the new destination could take, then no, it may not have made much difference.

It was the same with daughters i3 Tosh laptop. I have done several others that haven't been so 'obvious' in the improvement but they were usually either crappy SSD's or not a bottleneck in the first place.

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

Ah. I've got a 120GB SSD hanging off this XP / Mac Mini that I know it can't deal with 'nicely' (no TRIM etc).

So was that under the control of the OS, even when using a bootable partition tool (like Acronis)?

Yeah, I'm happy it will work (and faster than the old HDD), it was just the question of if it would be optimised (if I had a free choice of cloning or installing from scratch). I'll take your reassurance that it will and clone. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

<snip>

If it were here I could back it up to my WHS, swap drives and image it back from the server. That way I still have the original drive (intact), a backup on the server and am writing the new drive when it's in it's final position. ;-)

Yeah. I might on one of my home built desktops as I may have disabled any unused / wanted onboard devices to help KISS. ;-)

I find it a bit of a disappointment when I check for BIOS updates and there aren't any (rare). More confusing when you find you are running a later BIOS version than they have on their support sire (even when it's a few years old)?

That's what daughters i3 W7 laptop went to ... from about 3 mins and made a big difference to how (often especially) she used it.

Cheers, T i m

[John Rumm]

Normally just a problem on the built in partition / install tools.

If you run msinfo32, then look under Components, Storage, & Disks it should show you the Partition Starting Offset for each logical volume. Divide that by 4096 and check you get an integer result.

[T i m]

<snip>

Good tip, will do, thanks.

Cheers, T i m

[John Rumm]

or do it from the command line:

Do:

diskpart

Then get a list of disks:

list disk

Select the one you are interested in:

select disk <n>

Now get a list of partitions on the selected disk:

list partition

Now select the partition of interest:

select partition <n>

finally:

detail partition

That will show among other things the "offset in bytes"

[T i m]

I have used diskpart in the past but feel uncomfortable doing so (when making changes) because there is no visual representation of what you are doing, unlike many of the GUI tools these days.

I'll transfer this to my phone so have it with me when I do the upgrade (for the S&G's). ;-)

Cheers, T i m