The machines hard drive is getting full, causing problems running, so it's time to upgrade the drive.

All the data other than the outlook data file is stored on two external drives.

The main hard drive which is an SSD PC SN250 NVMe WDC 256GB drive.

I have a 512GB SSD that I want to replace it with however I'd like to be able to replace it and keep the existing drives information.

I also have a WD Blue drive that I can install in the PC at the same time to increase drive capacity.

Interested in ideas on how to manage the upgrade, cloning, or install the new drive and install a fresh copy of windows 11, then reinstall all the applications and what steps are necessary to accomplish this.

I've built machines from desktop to servers in the past, quite familiar computers but would like to ensure I don't miss a step and screw the whole thing up.

Acronis has excellent software for Cloning and Maintaining "hard drives" of any type. Do a search for Acronis True Image. BTW I've been using this software to Clone my primary drives since 2015 or so. Works great when a drive gets corrupted or fails because all you have to do is swap in a spare Clone.

I strongly recommend that you plan on upgrading to a 1 tb SSD. The cost difference is slight and going forward you will find yourself needing more space.

At this point you should look and see if the motherboard has any open NVMe drive slots. If you have that it will speed up cloning your current drive onto the new drive a bit faster. Take note that Acronis will create a bootable clone so you'll get a warning about having two bootable clones on the computer. Easy way to solve that issue is to remove your primary and move the clone to the slot for your primary. Note, on many computers the slot for the primary will be faster than the spare slots so moving the clone to the primary slot can improve the speed by a small amount.

I will also note that purchasing a heat sink for the new drive will extend the life of the drive. My motherboard came with heat sinks for NVMe drives but it is a high end motherboard. If you have a budget motherboard typical for off the shelf computer you may not see any heat sinks. If that is the case purchase a heat sink. BTW the heat sinks are basically an aluminum plate with some short fins that hold down the NVMe drives.

BTW, I usually build my desktops every 10 years or so and go top end for those builds. Did the same with my new computer and expect that it will still work fine when I hit 80. When you factor in a 10 year service life dropping 2500 dollars on a new build is relatively cheap.

Do you have more than one PCIe slot on your MB?
^^^ Assuming the new drive is also a M2 NVMe drive and not SATA.

If so then it will be easy.
* Install drive.
* Use the Drive migration software or similar to clone the drive.
* Then you may need to make sure in BIOS that the new drive is seen first to boot to that drive.
* Then do as you will with the old drive data.

If you do not, then you will need to mount that drive in a USB enclosure first.

Either way you will boot to the Migration software and the entire contents is copied bit-by-bit to the new drive.

Most drive companies offer this software for free or you can buy some such as Acronis.

Good Luck

As usual, Schulzy hits the nail square on the head. But he includes the "Good Luck" there at the end of his post for a reason. Drives, and the data they hold are fragile containers subject to accidents of nature, and unwitting administrative fumbles.

As an alternative approach, perhaps a little safer and easier, but almost certainly more costly...consider purchasing an expandable (because this situation will inevitably recur) NAS device to house your data. A suitably configured device can act as a data store, first stage backup device, home media server, file server, etc. Put your fast SSD drives in this chassis which will have much faster memory<->storage circuitry than a typical desktop PC. With a decent LAN (Gig or 10Gig), I doubt you will see any loss of performance (until you get into hundreds of clients).

This is what businesses do (at some level of scale and redundancy) to insure data integrity and retention. No reason, besides cost, for home users to do similar, and the devices and skills needed to implement this capability have become far more accessible in recent years.

Board has one M2 SSD NVMe drive/slot for SSD

Internal:

M.2 card

One M.2 2230 slot for wireless and bluetooth combo card
One M.2 2230/2280 slot for Solid-State Drive (SSD)/Intel Optane memory


I have a Dell Original (PC is Inspiron 3670) 2230 SSD in 512 MB

Specs on Box are Here:
Link


There are instructions for creating a USB recovery drive for windows at that link, would this be a good way to proceed, create recovery USB and then swap old SSD for new

Other option would be to add the WD Blue drive and use Acronis to create a clone on it, then swap in new SSD and move it back to that drive?

At a high level this is what I would do.

* Use cloning software to make an image of your current drive to an external hard drive, or your WD drive.

* Using an NVME to USB Adapter, plug in your new drive. Amazon Link

* Use your cloning software to copy the image on your external/WD drive to the new drive.

* Swap the drives.

There's many ways to do this, but this is probably how I would do it if I only had one computer. I use Macrium Reflect for cloning. You will likely have to play around with whatever software you use to account for the added space.

quote:

Originally posted by HRK:
The machines hard drive is getting full, causing problems running, so it's time to upgrade the drive.

All the data other than the outlook data file is stored on two external drives.

The main hard drive which is an SSD PC SN250 NVMe WDC 256GB drive.

If it's just an OS drive and you don't have a ton of large programs, your drive is full of crap, literally.

Run Disk Cleanup in Admin mode & see how much you can get back > 1-2Gb is normal if I run it every 6 months or so. It's likely win11 updates using a sizable chunk - in Disk Cleanup > More Options, click 'clean up' under 'System Restore and Shadow Copies'. If you check before & after, you'll probably see an increase in used space on C:, but it should go down when you reboot.

If you clone the drive, you're cloning the crap.
If you have the software & keys/licenses, pull the old drive, put the new in & load a fresh OS. It's not as bad as older version, but win11 still slows down the longer it lives.

For comparison, I have win11, full Office2021 (small outlook .ost for personal mail), Office365, 2 CAD programs (space hogs), KiCAD (6GB by itself), 3 or 4 3D Printer slicers and a ton of 3D models (5GB)
I'm using <100GB & I haven't really paid much attention to optimization since I have a 500GB drive.

Your best bet is to get a nmve usb dock. Install the new ssd in that and plug into your computer. Most new hard drives will come with cloning software so it will transfer the entire image of your hard drive to the new one. That way, you can pop in the new one and it will boot up just like the old one.

Samsung's Migrate (free) software does a fantastic job, provided your destination drive is a Samsung.

quote:

Originally posted by xantom:

* Using an NVME to USB Adapter, plug in your new drive. Amazon Link

Ordered that USB adapter thanks

I like the idea of starting a fresh drive, since the PC was preloaded with windows and uses MSFT 365 I need to locate the codes in order to do that.

Looked on the box don't see the MS sticker, maybe it's inside.
is there a simple way to extract the code on the pc and print it out
so I can do a fresh install.

Clean install is best option IMO, if you are capable of reinstalling apps and migrating related data.

You can simply create a bootable USB drive to install Windows 11. This might negate the need for the USB Adapter.

Windows 10 and 11 don't use Product Keys, the OS license is tied to your hardware. Just install and it will auto activate.

"Create Windows 11 Installation Media"
https://www.microsoft.com/en-u...e-download/windows11


* Download bootable media(OS) to a flash drive.
* Backup your data.
* Install the new Drive.
* Boot to the USB drive with W11 bootable media
* Install Windows 11 on your new drive.
* Reinstall apps/transfer data.
* Login to your MS account and download 365.

Edited for a few other things.
If you are not currently on W11, you might have make changes to the BIOS to activate TPM, secure boot, or other changes necessary to install 11.

Though not likely, it's possible windows will need an additional driver for your drive. I've done quite a few clean installs of 11 and haven't ran into this yet that I can recall but it was definitely an issue with certain drives on W10. I just kept those drivers right on the flash drive I used to install the OS. Good Luck!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: xantom,

Thanks for all the help, It's win 11 there are only a few apps that I will need to reinstall, Acrobat, 365, and a few more, I'll just need to find the .pst file for outlook, move it to one of the other drives and then keep it there if outlook will recognize and allow the file from another location.

Clone the drive and be done. Not a chance I have time to do a clean install. All the updates, drivers, 10 years worth of tax software, etc.

I'm actually at a point where I may just start using virtual machines for most things.

Windows Vista was the last time I think I've had to do a clean install to fix something. With 6mbps DSL and spinning drives I think it was a two day process.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: trapper189,

^^^ Yeah, there is no real reason to do a new install unless you have some other lingering inherit problem.

The adapter should be here today, after work I'll start looking at swapping the drives and doing the clone, there's not a lot of data on the existing drive, outlook file and the normal user data and
the one drive from MSFT as well.

quote:

Originally posted by SIG4EVA:
Your best bet is to get a nmve usb dock. Install the new ssd in that and plug into your computer. Most new hard drives will come with cloning software so it will transfer the entire image of your hard drive to the new one. That way, you can pop in the new one and it will boot up just like the old one.

This is NOT a great way to clone a drive. The fastest USB port on a computer today is USB-4 otherwise known as Thunderport. That can provide a sustained transfer rate of 800-1200 mb/s which is quite slow compared to NVMe or SATA. This Dell computer we are talking about here probably only has USB 3.0 ports witch will provided a sustained transfer rate of 50 mg/s.

I've been there done that and 250 gb took about 4 hours to transfer via USB-3.0.

For this Dell the best approach will be to use a SATA SSD to provide a transfer intermediate for a clone of the current drive and then mount the new NVMe drive and clone that from the intermediate. Note you will probably have to do some form of initializing for the new drive. How to do that can be found with a Google search.

will also note that Onedrive is HORRIBLE. Fill that "drive" and you will find you have nearly ZERO mouse or keyboard access. Every single time that upgrade notice comes up it will lock up the mouse and keyboard for 30-40 seconds before it releases the mouse and keyboard for 2 or 3 seconds. As a result it will take about 3 minutes to get the mouse pointer over to that tab and when you click on it the only option presented will be to upgrade so Microshit can grab more money out of your pocket. BTW, Microsoft stores meaningless crap such as login records for every single site visited just to speed up filling that Onedrive.

If you don't like being blackmailed into constant upgrades it is possible to opt out of Onedrive. However something simple like Uninstalling Onedrive won't provide a solution. Because every time Microshit issues an update it will re-install Onedrive. Currently I've done a deep dive into the operations for Windows and disabled every single aspect of Onedrive. Use a google search for "permanently disabling Onedrive" and proceed from there using a gpedit.msc procedure. I will also note that most of the settings need to be ENABLED to actually prevent that specific feature from functioning. Also this will not work with the Home version of Windows 11, it's only available for the Pro version.