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?

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.

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

A week or so ago Iasked a related question at the Lounge. Guess you'll get more attention there.

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Thanks, hard to know where to pose this sort of question.

Sorty I didn't see this sooner. Yes, you can do exactly that. I've done it many times.

I highly recommend Samsung SSDs. Their software works great. You can also use Acronis, but it's not quite as straightforward.

I had no trouble with acronis earlier this year.

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.