Adding an mSata SSD to my laptop.

[Fill6251]

Hey All,
 

New to the forum. As the title says I will be adding a mSata ssd to my laptop. I will be getting my Samsung - 850 EVO 250GB today. I have seen that most people are reinstalling their OS. Is that necessary or would I be able to transfer that over. I guess my concern is that I have a 1TB hdd and when doing a backup the system image is about 310GB, which will not fit 250GB ssd. I would prefer not to reinstall my Win10 if I don't have to. 

Any help would be appreciated.

[Electronics Wizardy]

You need to delete some files from the drive then to clone it over.

[Biggerboot]

9 minutes ago, Fill6251 said:

Hey All,
 

New to the forum. As the title says I will be adding a mSata ssd to my laptop. I will be getting my Samsung - 850 EVO 250GB today. I have seen that most people are reinstalling their OS. Is that necessary or would I be able to transfer that over. I guess my concern is that I have a 1TB hdd and when doing a backup the system image is about 310GB, which will not fit 250GB ssd. I would prefer not to reinstall my Win10 if I don't have to. 

Any help would be appreciated.

Try shrinking your windows partition (the large one) down in disk management if you have enough free space.  Then use a cloning tool for the transfer, making sure the whole disk is cloned and not just that partition.

 

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg309169.aspx

 

[SadPCer]

11 minutes ago, Fill6251 said:

Hey All,
 

New to the forum. As the title says I will be adding a mSata ssd to my laptop. I will be getting my Samsung - 850 EVO 250GB today. I have seen that most people are reinstalling their OS. Is that necessary or would I be able to transfer that over. I guess my concern is that I have a 1TB hdd and when doing a backup the system image is about 310GB, which will not fit 250GB ssd. I would prefer not to reinstall my Win10 if I don't have to. 

Any help would be appreciated.

Use maxrium reflect to clone to your ssd you will also need a sata cable that des not come with the ssd.

[Fill6251]

26 minutes ago, Biggerboot said:

Try shrinking your windows partition down in disk management if you have enough free space.  Then use a cloning tool for the transfer, making sure the whole disk is cloned and not just that partition.

 

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg309169.aspx

 

Isn't this only good to free up space that is already empty?
 

26 minutes ago, SadPCer said:

Use maxrium reflect to clone to your ssd you will also need a sata cable that des not come with the ssd.

I'll check that out. I received a free data transfer cable with my purchase. 

[SadPCer]

6 minutes ago, Fill6251 said:

Isn't this only good to free up space that is already empty?
 

I'll check that out. I received a free data transfer cable with my purchase. 

Alright

[Biggerboot]

11 minutes ago, Fill6251 said:

Isn't this only good to free up space that is already empty?

Sorry, my impression was that you did have the free space necessary and that the size of your system image was bloated compared to what you actually had.

 

What I would start doing on the 1tb is backing up all the data you can to either another drive or in a separate partition.  Then backup everything on the drive except that newly created partition, and keep the 1tb for extra storage.

[Fill6251]

13 minutes ago, Biggerboot said:

Sorry, my impression was that you did have the free space necessary and that the size of your system image was bloated compared to what you actually had.

 

What I would start doing on the 1tb is backing up all the data you can to either another drive or in a separate partition.  Then backup everything on the drive except that newly created partition, and keep the 1tb for extra storage.

I was asking if that was only good to free up space to get a new partition, since that is the only reason I have used that before. 
My 1TB drive that currently has my OS and all my other data on it has a system image of a 310GB. Are you saying that I could shrink the system image buy moving around the free space?

 

And thanks everyone for your help

[Biggerboot]

23 minutes ago, Fill6251 said:

I was asking if that was only good to free up space to get a new partition, since that is the only reason I have used that before. 
My 1TB drive that currently has my OS and all my other data on it has a system image of a 310GB. Are you saying that I could shrink the system image buy moving around the free space?

 

And thanks everyone for your help

If you were already using up ~300gb of space in your hard drive's properties then no.  But by system image I assume you mean a backup you created.  Sometimes the software you would use to create an image would bloat it in size depending on the method it uses - including the blank allocated space in the partition.  So shrinking the windows partition may help reduce the size if you weren't using that much space.

 

I would personally back up my data and start over, but you did mention you were trying to avoid this.  It would be best to back up your crucial data somewhere else if possible.