Cloning Win 10 to Much Smaller SSD?

[cynicaldriver]

OK. I have searched, but not found a clear answer to this...

I have a 2TB HDD (Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001)

I also bought a 240GB Intel 535 SSD back in September (when I bought the computer.)

 

I am finally getting the desire to install the SSD. (Have some time off from college this month.)

 

Now, what I need to know is whether there is a reliable free software solution for cloning the current MHDD to the SSD. Current used space on the 2TB is 190GB. This is after uninstalling several games. I would Ideally like to use the SSD as a boot drive and for installing the most important bits of software, and a couple important games. The problem is that I don't really want to just clone steam over, because it defaults to installing new games in the steamapps folder, rather than where I would like, so I am thinking about uninstalling Steam all together for now.

 

In any case, what would you recommend as the best course of action? I can see three options.

1. Install SSD and just clean install Windows 10 to it, and reinstall all software, then delete things from the other drive as I no longer need them (including the old OS)
2. Clone the current boot drive and deal with the potential headaches from cleaning the OS and redirecting new installs to the old drive.
3. Wait until January, and buy a 1TB SSD when I have the funds to do so, which would allow me to just do a simple cloning and forget it.

What software is the most reliable for cloning? (MUST be able to clone from drives LARGER than 1TB)

[burnttoastnice]

-snip-

 

There is software available to shrink the windows install partition on a drive so it can fit on a much smaller one (namely MiniTool Partition Wizard, used it for other disk partitioning tasks) but I have no experience with doing this and hence am in the same boat as you.

[cynicaldriver]

Well, I went ahead and did it. My impatience won out, and I gotta say... That wasn't so painful after all.

 

I used MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition and everything went pretty smoothly.

I now have my Intel SSD boot-drive with Windows 10 on it, and was even able to move the recovery partition over.

This software works brilliantly, and will easily handle different sized source and target drives.

 

I highly recommend it to anyone looking to upgrade to an SSD boot-drive.