Posted this in the Lair without much response. Another member recommended posting it here.

I've cloned many a drive using an external enclosure by Thermaltake called BlacX. This included a SATA SSD for my laptop.

I have a desktop with an HDD and would like to clone the HDD to a PCIe SSD that would then become the primary drive.

There is a PCIe slot on the motherboard. Can I simply install the SSD in the desktop, clone it in place, then shutdown, disconnect the boot drive and make sure the boot device is the new PCIe drive? Or do I need an external chassis or drive enclosure to do the cloning?

I've cloned drives with a laptop, cloning from the internal SATA to an eSATA on the same laptop. So, I assume I can do the same with the desktop between the SATA and the PCIe, but don't have any experience with that sort of interface.

If an enclosure is required, any recommandations. There are plethora of choices but I don't want to buy a piece of $hit enclosure or chassis, but don't want to spend too much since it's just an intermediate step.

The desktop is an HP Omen 870.

I haven't done this exact scenario, but you shouldn't need an external drive. Plug in your new drive and make sure it's recognized. Clone the drive. Unplug the sata plug to your old drive. Boot with your new drive. You might need to configure your bios to boot from that drive.

I use a SATA cable like this for cloning: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HJZJI84

So simple and bare bones, never had an issue with it. I boot off one of my USB sticks that has Clonezilla on it and go to town.

Basically I usually put the new drive in the system first, and hook up the old disk to the external SATA cable.

Basically what I've done in the past, but in reverse. I run the clone program from the existing drive rather than a USB. However, this might be worth a try.

quote:

Originally posted by xantom:
I haven't done this exact scenario, but you shouldn't need an external drive. Plug in your new drive and make sure it's recognized. Clone the drive. Unplug the sata plug to your old drive. Boot with your new drive. You might need to configure your bios to boot from that drive.

I was hoping it would go like that. We'll see.

quote:

I have a desktop with an HDD and would like to clone the HDD to a PCIe SSD that would then become the primary drive.

quote:

Can I simply install the SSD in the desktop, clone it in place, then shutdown, disconnect the boot drive and make sure the boot device is the new PCIe drive?

Yes.
Either with a bootable (USB or CD) clone software like Aronis or in many cases you can install the software, initiate what you want to clone and it will reboot and start the process.
Just shut down after it is done, remove the original and then boot to the drive.
Like I said in a previous thread most SSD companies have this software available for free.
You might need to install NVMe drivers afterwards depending on the OS and actual drive.
Intel?

I used a program called Echo that came with a usb cable that plugged into the SSD .. it was great I ran the program.. Swapped the drive and rebooted, and everything was perfect. I did not even have to re activate windows 7

Just a question, would it be worth doing a fresh install of Windows 10 directly onto the new drive and leaving your data files on the HDD? I keep my operating system and application software on my SSD boot drive and everything else on a 2TB HDD, and image both drives separately to make restoration much easier, should the need ever arise.

I would do a fresh install, but that's me. Reinstalling software would be the only issue.

I would also do a fresh install, regardless of the OS you're using. Backup only the data and reinstall whatever programs you use.

Wanted to report back on the upgrade.

It was ridiculously simple. The only wrinkle being that the PCIe M.2 slot was underneath the substantial video card. The card was stabilized by a bracket which also had to be removed to remove the card.

However all that went well. The Samsung Magician software recognized the SSD and the Data Migration software cloned the drive in about 13 minutes (very little data at this point). I bought a Samsung V-NAND 970 Evo 500G NVMe M.w SSD. This is essentially the boot drive.

After that, I took a 1TB Samsung 860 Evo I had which I had used in my laptop, formatted it and added it to the system as a second drive. Any additional software and data will go on this drive.

Once I cloned the drive, I simply shut down and rebooted. There was no need to get into the BIOS and change the boot order.