A couple of days ago, I decided to examine if cloning Windows was as bad as everyone says it would be, in that you'll run in to problems and other issues. So I'm using my laptop as a test bed for this project to see if anything really happens if you clone Windows.

When I started this project, I installed Windows 10 Fall Creator's Update to the laptop's SSHD, then installed programs that I would've used in a normal setting, and imported the settings of two of them (Visual Studio Code and Firefox). I also ran a 3DMark test suite and used the laptop as I normally would outside of gaming for a day. Today, I did the cloning process, which is cloning the SSHD contents onto the SSD. Since I have a Samsung SSD, I used Samsung's Disk Migration utility.

So here's the immediate results of the project so far:

• When on the SSHD
  • Power on to login screen was 18.8 seconds.
  • Reboot time from when the screen blacked out to login time was 26.8 seconds, with a BIOS time of 5.8 seconds.
  • Superfetch was enabled
  • The drive was being indexed
  • The partition was 4K aligned (this is important)
• When on the SSD:
  • Boot time was about 12.28 to 12.98 seconds with a BIOS time of 5.8 seconds
  • Superfetch was enabled
  • The drive was being indexed
  • The partition was 4K aligned
  • Trim was enabled and Windows knew it was an SSD in disk defragmenter
  • 3DMark and CrystalDiskMark runs showed no anomalies, indicating that no system software got buggered.
  • So far the only "issue" was after booting into the SSD for the first time after the cloning, Task Manager appeared to take longer to load.

I did also notice one other thing while I was on the SSHD, it's actually not that bad to use. Perhaps it already cached the important things that I use but it wasn't really that bad compared to using an SSD. Load times were barely longer if I noticed and the system was still running mostly buttery smooth. Heck, most of the time when I logged in, it was practically instant (i.e., no "loading" or spinning circle)

I've already set myself on the path of no return by cleaning the SSHD. From here until the end of the month or so I'll be monitoring for issues that crop up.