How to install an SSD - clone your boot drive without losing a thing | SSD upgrade

hello and welcome to this week's Hardware show I'm Dave the resident Hardware guru hello and I'm rich the in this context the hardware assistant lovely assistant and today we're going to show you how to install a new SSD as your main boot drive and what might be the benefits of doing that day so putting a new SSD into your machine will lift the whole performance a bit make it feel a bit more responsive and you should get faster game load times - okay cool so how would I go about that would I just sort of plug it in and copy across some files or you can just absolutely just drop it in as a data drive and it'll pop up the windows and appear as just a normal store where is drive so you can use that as your new Steam installation folder and games will run a bit quicker you load a bit quicker and stuff as well but you might get a full benefit of an SSD unless you use it as a boot drive ok cool so that would mean installing your written system windows whatever it may be on that as well as everything else that you want to give a little bit of a kick to yeah absolutely I mean that can be quite daunting to go for a fresh installation of Windows get real applications set up again but it's actually really really simple to clone your entire boot drive onto the new SSD and that's what we're gonna show you today awesome it's just really easy just need a little bit of software a little bit of time and doctor Gooden they step one is to make sure that your old installation will fit on your new drive it's a first off you need to compare the sizes of your installation if the use space is bigger on your current drive than the total capacity of your new SSD then you're gonna need to do some housekeeping here we've got a 340 gigabytes of view space going onto a 750 gigabyte SSD so that's not too bad but if you do need to make some space you can just under stall some games or apps from within Windows like so or user programs such as windiest at this will display all your different file types in grouped colored blocks to make it easier to see what's taking up space and then you can just uninstall data from within those programs okay so this step is all about getting you a new SSD into your PC so first off you need to locate the relevant cables so you need a sort of power cable like so a little bit thinner than the standard monette cables and you also need a starter data cable which is one of these and it'll go back with your PC so it might come in the extras that you got also get them with motherboards and possibly with you on USS Dean - okay and this is all for mounting a standard 2.5 inch SSD but there's a new format as well the nvme SSDs yeah that's right so that's these little things here so that's a full terabyte on a little slice of PCB so there's a mount in a slightly different way so they go directly onto the motherboard I mean these little PCI Express slots here so they're called MDOT tubes okay cool and because they're you know relatively new and I imagine they're quite expensive yeah I mean they're a lot more expensive than the standard 2.5 inch drive but they are also a lot quicker as well so that's the flagship for SSDs but if you just want to save a bit of money standard 2.5 inch drives so it's still a lot quicker than hard drives ok cool so how do we not one of those ok so you need to locate the mounting points inside your chassis so where the standard hard drives are you'll have brackets that you can put the 2.5 inch SSDs in and as I said the end or two drives go into this little socket up here so now we just need to attach our drive ok so you need to attach the SSD to the mounting point in your chassis here it drops into a spare drive bay so you can just screw it into the caddy and drop it into the drive bay then you need to attach the separate starter power and data cables so this is the data cable here just drop that in until it clicks and do the same we're the spare starter power cable to feed the data cable through your chassis and plug it into a spare starter port on your motherboard end up to SSDs are even easier to install you simply slide them into a spare socket on your motherboard and screw them into place you may need to locate a separate riser screw to separate it from your motherboard and but that will be in your spares or motherboard box you kept all that right there download a program called Macri and reflect this is the tool that we'll use to clone our current installation onto our SSD so install that take a look a couple of minutes and then you just run it Macroom reflect will analyze your system and display all the attached drives on your pc so select the drive you want to clone and click clone this disk this is the drive that will contain your c drive with extra partitions now those partitions are still quite important so you need to copy the whole lot across our current SSD has got an installation on it already so we just need to delete these existing partitions to make sure we've got a clean block to copy to so once that's done drag your current partitions over onto the spare space here we've completely filled it up so we'll need to shrink down this final partition here so you can shrink a partition by selecting it and hitting the cloned partition properties button so we need to free up 10 gigabytes for the final partition so we just need to shrink that partition down a little bit so once it's been shrunk down we've got spare space and we can drop the final partition in and extend that to complete the drive [Music] now set up the partitions for cloning we can click Next a couple of times and check that you're definitely cloning the right drive to the right SSD because once you hit finish this will all kick off so select run this backup now click OK and it will go this is gonna take a while [Music] three hours later so now it's just a case of getting your PC to boot with your new SSD first off you need to disconnect your old drive to make sure that your PC's definitely booting off your new SSD right and then you should be getting into windows and both everything and hopefully nothing will be different okay great and once we've done that what our options for stuff to do with our old hard drive just use that to boost the storage of your PC so what you're absolutely confident that your new SSD is up and running and stable and everything's hunky-dory you can plug in your old hard drive change the boot priorities in your BIOS so it's definitely booting off the SSD and then what you get into Windows you can just format your drive from within there have lots of extra storage space for all the good stuff okay ideal and that's your job done right okay cool thanks very much Dave for walking us through that thank you for watching there's plenty more on PC gaming in general and about hardware specifically on our website and on our youtube channel so like share and subscribe to keep up to date and we'll see you next time take care thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: PCGamesN

Views: 3,147,502

Keywords: PCGamesN, PC Games N, PC gaming, PC games, videogames, video games, games, top 10 games, best games, gameplay, Hardware, PC Hardware, Changing an SSD, Installing an SSD, SSD, Cloning an SSD, Clone your boot drive, SSD Installation, How to, PC Hardware Guide, install ssd, upgrade ssd

Id: 7H7D1HcfY9o

Length: 6min 50sec (410 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 19 2017