A Beginners Guide: Upgrade Your Hard Drive to a SSD - How to Clone Your OS Drive, Acronis True Image

as i'm sure you are aware running your os and applications from a solid-state drive or ssd can noticeably improve the performance of your computer ssds read and write data much more quickly than a traditional hard drive so naturally many people have begun upgrading two ssds but when upgrading i don't think most people want to start brand new by installing a brand new fresh copy of windows onto their drive i think that most people want to keep all of their programs and files intact which requires cloning their existing drive to their new ssd and in this video i am going to show you just how to do that the new drive you'll be copying windows onto needs to be initialized first in order to copy your operating system onto it in my last video i went through the physical process of installing a hard drive or ssd in your computer and how to initialize and format it to use as additional storage if you're in need of some help with that process i've linked my other video in the cards which is popping up now and also in the video description for drive cloning the only software i've ever used is called a cronus true image so that's what i'm going to be showing how to use cronus is not free however so in order to clone your existing drive you do need to buy a license they do have a 30-day free trial of true image however cloning your drive is the one function that doesn't work in the free trial there is other free software out there you can clone your drive with but i don't know how much i can trust most of those uh also some of them i looked into are a bit more complicated than i think most people would want to attempt to use so anyway since a cronus true image is so simple to use and i have experience using it that's the route i've chosen to go for this video to get a cronus true image first we need to open up our web browser and go to acronis.com true image i've placed a link to their download page in the video description to make it a little bit easier for you to get there here we're going to click on buy now and as of the making of this video a one year subscription is 34.99 us but if you happen to have honey installed on your browser it may be able to help save you some money here no i am not sponsored by honey but it did save me 15 on my purchase of a cronus true image bringing my total cost to 20 u.s and in my opinion being able to easily copy my os drive is certainly worth 20 you obviously will need to input your information into these fields on the right here and once you've paid for your copy you'll be sent an email and taken to a page that looks similar to this you'll want to click download and once the download has finished you can click on it at the bottom of your browser window windows will then ask you if you want to allow this application to make changes to your computer which you need to say yes to and from there the installation wizard will come up click on install and true image will then install to your computer as soon as the installation finishes you'll be brought to their quick start guide web page where it will quickly introduce you to the main features of true image which you're welcome to take a look at but if you're ready to just jump right in you can close out or minimize your web browser and come back to this window and click start application you'll then need to check this box here saying you accept the terms of their license agreement and click ok this next screen is where you'll need to copy your license key into and then click on register at this point i think you'll be asked to set up an acronis account um but i'm not entirely sure about this because i have an acronis account already so i just had to log into mine so once your account has been created and you're all logged in you'll be greeted with what i guess is the welcome screen which highlights the different features of true image you can either skip this or just click next on through it and once that's done you'll be dropped into the window where we can finally get down to business on the left hand side here we want to select tools and the two tools we're most interested in for cloning our drive are these first two here the clone disk tool obviously and the rescue media builder the rescue media builder allows you to create a bootable flash drive which you can boot your computer from and use the clone disk tool that way but it's obviously much more simple to just use the clone disk tool right here so that's what i'm going to show how to do if you choose to go the bootable flash drive route the interface looks pretty much exactly the same once you boot in so here's how things are more or less going to look once you've selected clone disk first you'll be asked if you want to use automatic or manual mode of course the simplest thing to do is just use automatic and click next it will then ask us which drive it is we want to clone the computer i'm using for this tutorial has two different sata drives installed in it and a third m.2 nvme drive which is the drive i want to copy windows onto the top one here is a two terabyte sata ssd which is the drive windows is installed onto and the one below it is a two terabyte mechanical hard drive which i plan to use for mass storage i actually haven't formatted the mechanical drive yet which shows up as unallocated at the bottom of the window when i click on that drive this bottom portion of the window here shows how your selected drive is partitioned and how much space is being used on that drive i obviously want to clone this first drive here as it's the one with windows installed on it so i'll select it and then click next acronis will think for a little bit at this point but should come to this screen next where it asks which drive you want to copy to like i mentioned a little bit ago i want to use my one terabyte intel nvme drive here for my boot drive so i will select it and click next acronis is now warning me here that the drive i'm copying to has been formatted already and that the cloning process is going to remove any partitions or data currently on that drive i'm not worried about that at all because this is a brand new drive with absolutely nothing on it anyway i just initialized and formatted it to make sure that acronis would recognize the drive and allow me to copy to it i'll now click ok and the next question it will ask is what cloning method do we want to use there are three different options here the first is the one we want which is to replace a disk on this machine you can also clone to use on a different machine or simply clone as a data disk we want the first option which is already selected for us so we can just go ahead and click next now we are at the summary window where acronis is showing us what it's going to be doing to our selected target drive this top bar shows us what the current format of that drive is and the bottom bar shows us what it's going to look like once the cloning process has completed since we're ready to go we can click on proceed and true image will begin the cloning process at this point you can go get something to eat watch a show or just do something else entirely because the process takes a bit of time to complete the more files you have to copy over the longer it's going to take the machine i'm using for this video pretty much just has windows installed on it and not much else so it took about five minutes to complete just as a side note i did try cloning my gaming slash editing rig os drive uh before making this video which has about 500 gigs of stuff on it and was using a usb 3.0 adapter to copy my os drive to another drive and that took just shy of an hour to copy so depending on how much stuff you're copying and the interface your drives are using the amount of time this process takes will vary quite a bit once the cloning process has finished you should see this window letting you know your disk was successfully cloned it also gives you some steps to follow depending on the cloning method you chose and here it's telling me to remove the source disk which i could do but i want to keep using that disk in this pc for other things so what i'm going to do now is restart my computer and boot into the bios where i can change which drive the computer boots to so let's click ok here close out a cronus true image and restart our system to access your motherboard bios you'll need to repeatedly press a key on your keyboard as your computer boots most motherboards i've ever used you press the delete key but you should see a prompt on your motherboard splash screen that will let you know what key to press to enter setup on your computer depending on your motherboard manufacturer your bio screen is going to look very different from mine here but what we need to change is our boot priority over here on the right you can see the first device on the boot list is my two terabyte sata ssd and the second device is my intel m.2 nvme ssd i need to switch that so the m.2 ssd is first to do that i'm going to switch to advanced mode which you can see at the bottom right hand corner here i need to press f7 on my keyboard to do once in advanced mode i'm going to use the arrow keys on my keyboard to navigate to the right to the boot tab here i can go down to boot option number one and hit enter on it which will then show me the options i have the two terabytes sata drive is currently the number one option so i'm going to press the down arrow on my keyboard to go to the m.2 ssd and then hit enter since those are the only two boot drive options on this pc it automatically changes my sata ssd to boot option number two and now all we need to do is use our arrow keys to navigate over to exit then down to save changes and reset hit enter when it asks us to hit ok and now the computer will reboot using our newly cloned drive and as you can see everything looks exactly the same as before when we were using the original drive which is exactly what we wanted thanks for watching i hope the video was helpful to you and before you take off please give the video a like leave a comment share with your family and friends and if you'd like to see more videos from me you can subscribe to the channel for the low low price of zero dollars per month yup that's right subscribing is free i do have an amazon store which i've placed a link to in the video description if you'd like to check out and purchase items i feature from time to time in my videos like the ssds i used in this video i hope you have a great day and i look forward to seeing you in another video real soon later [Music] you

Channel: Maraksot78

Views: 98,065

Keywords: tutorial, how to, upgrade, install, ssd, SSD, m.2 drive, m.2 ssd, M.2 SSD, solid state drive, Solid State Drive, HDD, hdd, hard drive, mechanical hard drive, hard disk, solid state disk, m.2 disk, NVME, nvme, 2280 m.2 nvme ssd, 2260 m.2 ssd, 2242 m.2 drive, storage, add ssd, clone drive, copy Windows, copy OS, copy Operating System, clone OS, clone operating system, Acronis, true image, trueimage, True Image, TrueImage, clone Windows, copy drive

Id: 8SYg8ieAzzU

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 01 2021