How do I clone an M.2 SSD with OS?

[Sigfried]

I am replacing an old nvme ssd with a newer, bigger one.

 

It's my primary drive and among the softwares and other things I also have Windows (10) installed on it.

I do not have any other M.2 ports on my motherboard and never moved an entire OS.

 

What is the best way to perfectly clone the old SSD onto the new one?

 

Are there specific tools? (soft and/or hardware)

Any reccomendations?

[RONOTHAN##]

12 minutes ago, Sigfried said:

What is the best way to perfectly clone the old SSD onto the new one?

There's three ways, either have both drives installed on the same system, have a second drive with enough free storage to fit an entire image of your boot drive on, or buy a dedicated SSD duplication rig like this. Since the duplicator method is fairly expensive, I'd remove that from the running, leaving the second intermediate drive and same system methods. 

 

If you have an old HDD in the same system with enough space to copy all of your data over, do this method. Most storage cloning software will have the option to backup to an image that can later be restored to a different drive. However, since you're doing this with a boot drive, you need to have it be a software running off a flash drive, so something like Clonezilla will be ideal. It's pretty easy to follow the instructions on there to backup a drive to an image file, then swap out the drive and restore said image file also with Clonezilla. 

 

If you don't have an old HDD to use, you'll need to get an external M.2 adapter like this. You put the new drive in that adapter, connect it to the same system, then use a piece of cloning software (either Clonezilla or something that runs in Windows like Macron Reflect) to clone the drive. Once the clone is complete, you swap the drives and now have an external SSD as well. 

[Sigfried]

15 hours ago, RONOTHAN## said:

There's three ways...

There's three ways, either have both drives installed on the same system, have a second drive with enough free storage to fit an entire image of your boot drive on, or buy a dedicated SSD duplication rig like this. Since the duplicator method is fairly expensive, I'd remove that from the running, leaving the second intermediate drive and same system methods. 

 

If you have an old HDD in the same system with enough space to copy all of your data over, do this method. Most storage cloning software will have the option to backup to an image that can later be restored to a different drive. However, since you're doing this with a boot drive, you need to have it be a software running off a flash drive, so something like Clonezilla will be ideal. It's pretty easy to follow the instructions on there to backup a drive to an image file, then swap out the drive and restore said image file also with Clonezilla. 

 

If you don't have an old HDD to use, you'll need to get an external M.2 adapter like this. You put the new drive in that adapter, connect it to the same system, then use a piece of cloning software (either Clonezilla or something that runs in Windows like Macron Reflect) to clone the drive. Once the clone is complete, you swap the drives and now have an external SSD as well. 

Thank you so so much, this is exactly what I needed.

[Sigfried]

15 hours ago, RONOTHAN## said:

If you don't have an old HDD to use, you'll need to get an external M.2 adapter like this.

Is there a reason not to use a PCIe x1 card adapter?

Here they cost less than external enclosures, I'm talking half the price.

If there aren't significant drawbacks I would opt for one of these, So I can also keep the old m.2 inside the system aswell.

Thanks again.

[RONOTHAN##]

40 minutes ago, Sigfried said:

Is there a reason not to use a PCIe x1 card adapter?

Didn't know how many PCIe slots you have, plus I'd generally think an old M.2 is better as an external SSD than it is as a secondary SSD. One of those will have about a quarter the bandwidth as the full size M.2 slots, but in practice this should be about as fast as the external adapters. If you are going to get one, I'd try to get one of the x4 cards like this or this instead, the pricing shouldn't be too much different and you'll be able to have the full PCIe bandwidth. 

 

Also, just saying, you can get them for about the same price. This one is currently $8 in the US, while those internal ones are $15 and $6 respectively, I just picked the first one on Google rather than looking for one that's priced the best. If you'd rather the internal drive however, it would work just as well. 

[Sigfried]

2 hours ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Didn't know how many PCIe slots you have . . . the pricing shouldn't be too much different and you'll be able to have the full PCIe bandwidth. 

Thanks for letting me know, I did take a look and My motherboard does feature a secondary x16 slot among the x1 ones (b450 tomahawk max), and I checked, they do indeed offer a x16 card for the same price.

 

2 hours ago, RONOTHAN## said:

an old M.2 is better as an external SSD than it is as a secondary SSD

I don't really have an use for it, (I would probably never use all the 500Gb, It would be wasted as an external drive)

I'd rather keep it in the system and use it for quick-access media, like editing footage or some of those games that benefit from it, like Cyberpunk, which is currently occupying a huge portion of the main drive.

 

2 hours ago, RONOTHAN## said:

This one is currently $8

Yeah... that is about the price I'm looking at for the PCIe cards over here, while all the enclosures are 15+

 

Again, thanks a lot for all the info!

[RONOTHAN##]

5 minutes ago, Sigfried said:

I don't really have an use for it, (I would probably never use all the 500Gb, It would be wasted as an external drive)

I'd rather keep it in the system and use it for quick-access media, like editing footage or some of those games that benefit from it, like Cyberpunk, which is currently occupying a huge portion of the main drive.

Fair enough, different people have different priorities and everything. 

 

6 minutes ago, Sigfried said:

Yeah... that is about the price I'm looking at for the PCIe cards over here, while all the enclosures are 15+

Didn't realize you were in Italy, yeah that would change the pricing and could make it about the same.