Old PC Upgrade #2: SSD Boot Drive

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers this time it's the second in the series in which i'm upgrading an old desktop pc in the first episode we considered our range of upgrade options and we also added some more memory and so this time i'm going to move on to storage and i'm going to migrate the pc's operating system and applications to an ssd so here we are back with our old pc with the left side panel removed so we can access its hard drive down here this is a western digital blue 320 gigabyte hard drive on which windows is installed along with all of the pc's applications and our goal here is to replace this disk with a solid state drive or ssd which should be much faster and which should therefore reduce the pc's boot time make applications launch more rapidly and improve the general responsiveness of the system our upgrade plan is to obtain an ssd to mount it in the case and connect it up and then to clone the contents of the hard drive to the ssd we can then disconnect the hard drive and in theory the pc will boot up from the ssd with windows and its applications still fully operational and all user data retained if we wish we can then reconnect and wipe the hard drive to serve as additional data storage and so now let's put this plan into action right the ssd we're going to fit is this 240 gigabyte gigabyte model which i purchased in january 2021 for 24 pounds 98 which is about 34 and which is a good price for a branded ssd of this capacity however i would strongly recommend shopping around as ssd prices vary a great deal sometimes day to day you may also have noticed that i purchased an ssd of a smaller capacity 240 gigabytes than the 320 gigabyte hard drive we're replacing and this is fine providing the space used on the hard drive is not larger than the capacity of the ssd so let's bring in a standard knife under open this thing up i think we're just going to cut the obligatory piece of tape like that you can get inside never had a gigabyte ssd before good noise there go on let us in there we are there's our drive it's an ssd it's never going to look massively different to what we expected it doesn't want to come out here with me it's stuck there we are here is our two and a half inch ssd and we need to mount this in our pc's case but our old pc doesn't have a two and a half inch bay to mount a drive of this size in so what are we going to do well what we're going to do is i purchased so see going over here i've purchased these this is a twin pack of what are described as a ssd mounting brackets basically brackets that convert a two and a half inch drive to a three and a half inch drive in terms of the bay so let's uh open it up and put that very well you know what i mean anyway let's get these out they all seem to come in packs of two open it up like this and this will allow us to mount this drive in the computer so let's put it together just need to get the screws there oh mr scissors can help us getting into the screws let's just get out the screws and there we are when i put the drive on the bait there we are and this is now all ready to mount in a three and a half inch bay in our computer right i've now got the pc upright and i've also removed the left side so we've got access to both sides of the drive cage so if we take our ssd on its bracket i'm going to slide in i think here just above the hard drive it should go in there like that if we just line up the holes there we are as well as holes we can use getting one of our screws like that just to solder off secure it on this one side there we are and then we'll secure it on the other and that's in as well there's now no way our ssd is going to escape this said it's worth noting you don't absolutely have to mount an ssd in a bay like this as it would be perfectly happy secured to the base of the case with something like removable blu-tack adhesive putty or even double-sided tape i'd never mount a hard drive this way but an ssd has no moving parts so mounting one like this is okay if you want to save on the cost of a two and a half to three and a half inch adapter or if you don't have any drive bays available so let's put the pc back on its side not least because it's easier for me to work on it and show you what i'm doing with it this way around and just before we continue i want to say a brief word about cable management because in my view the cable management inside this computer is really appalling not least it is so tight it's actually pulling one of the sata connectors out of the motherboard that isn't good the contention is is far too great here and also all the cables here are secured using zip ties which i did test because they can be difficult to cut off without damaging things when you need to repair or upgrade your computer and so before we go on i'm going to replace all the zip ties with either velcro or twist on cable restraint which i think a much better thing to use and there we are i'm now much happier our cable is now constrained in a looser and more upgrade friendly fashion and it's now time for us to connect the ssd to our computer's motherboard so we can clone the contents of the hard drive to the ssd and we could do this by plugging in a spare sata data lead like this and by finding a power connector on the loom that comes out of the power supply and plugging that in as well however i'm aware if you're upgrading a pc for the first time you might not have loads of satellites available you won't be like me and have a whole draw full of spare cables to use and it's also worth noting on this particular power supply we don't have any spare sata power connectors we've only got spare molex connectors and we could put adapters on here but i'm not going to do that rather i'm going to use the the simplest solution which is to say we've got sata power and data leads connected here to our dvd drive so what i'm going to do is to move them from the dvd temporarily to the ssd just so we can clone the contents from the hard drive to the ssd so let's take off the data connector you have to push in the thing there just to make it come out we've also got the power connector which has pulls that will go in down here like that and then we can put in the data connector up here this is all just temporary just so we can clone the contents there we are our ssd is now connected in so we can now boot up the pc and clone the contents of the hard drive to the ssd right i've now booted the machine up where we're going to use a piece of free software called macrium reflect to clone the hard drive to the ssd to get this software i visited macrium.com forward slash reflect free clicked to download the version for home use and decided not to enter an optional email address and clicked on continue this downloaded a small installer file which i opened up and then went with the default and clicked on download once this was complete the install came up where i allowed it to continue and clicked next soon followed by next again i then accepted the license opted for the home edition chose again not to register took the defaults on the next screen and finally clicked on install and so here back on the desktop in real time we're ready to run up the macrium software but before we do i just want to point out i am offline here i have removed the ethernet lead from this computer so we're not connected to the internet and this is because we're about to clone windows whilst it's running and we don't want windows trying to upgrade itself during that process so let's run up macum reflect and allow windows to execute the package there we are and here we are in what is a fantastic piece of software you can do all kinds of things in macro and reflect we don't need to do in this video if you want to know more about all this functionality you can look in my video all about drive imaging and cloning talking of cloning all we need to do here is to clone our hard drive to the ssd and the first drive our hard drive is already selected by default so we'll click on clone disk and we now need to select a disk to clone 2 which obviously would be our ssd there it is down there and in macro and reflect the easiest way to make things work is to drag the partitions we need to clone down to the drive we're cloning to and you'll see there's three partitions here this is a windows reserved partition which is used for various windows functions this is our c drive and over here is the windows recovery partition we want all of these to be cloned so we'll drag the first one drag it down to the ssd and then we'll drag the second one down to the ssd as well and you'll see here this has been resized because it is 297 gigabytes in size on the hard drive but we're closing to a smaller ssd so it's going to become 223 gigabytes but you can see the actual content of the drive 35.26 gigabytes is retained we're not losing any data but we don't have any space left here for this final partition so what i need to do is to select this partition here and click on clone partition properties and you can see here the amount of free space left on the drive so what we can do is to drag this slider just to give ourselves a little bit of space there we needed i think just about half a gigabyte we'll give ourselves a little bit more and that means we'll have a bit of space left to work with and it's worth pointing out if you were cloning from a smaller drive to a larger drive that's quite common what you would see when you went into this screen would look more like this to be lots of free space and you'd want to drag to make your drive use up almost all that free space again just leaving yourself enough space on the end for the windows recovery partition let's leave it about there and okay there's a little bit of space here we can now drag the recovery partition down into that space do be aware what you're seeing here is not proportional that's what 800 megabytes left that's 500 megabytes that's 50 megabytes that's 222 gigabytes so don't think there's lots of space left there because there isn't and there's no problem with having a small amount of space left on an ssd it's always good for the life of the drive so everything here is now set up for the clones we can select next and we don't need to schedule this it's a straightforward clones we'll click on next again and then everything here looks okay we've just set it all up so we'll click on finish it says do we want to do this now yes we do we'll click on ok it checks quite a few times which is a good idea when you're cloning a drive and macram will now get on with its task which will take a while so it's now time for me to have a rather late lunch and here i am back again the clone has completed it didn't take too long here just under half an hour i've also had some food so i'm more provisioned for the rest of the afternoon so we now need to click on ok here and it'll hopefully do something there we are we can close that down now we can now close and also the macro package close on anything else happens to be open and we will now also shut down the pc right here i am back again and just before we reboot the computer i'm going to switch around some cables specifically i'm going to take the static cables off the ssd which we took from the dvd driver if you remember we're going to put them back on the dvd drive take that off there put these back on the dvd power and data like that so the dvd is now happy again and i've got to take the cables off the hard drive which we've cloned from and put them onto the ssd so we'll connect in the power that was on the hard drive and more specifically importantly the data that was on the hard drive hopefully we can get that round to the ssd it's secured in a rather strange fashion all what did i say about the cable manager on this pc before there we are we can get it round like that and we can put this onto the ssd hopefully it'll clip on there and there we are we've now really exchanged the hard drive for the ssd we've cloned the content of a hard drive to the ssd and the ssd is now connected to the computer's motherboard by the same sata connector the same set of connection that the hard drive was connected by and my advice to you is whenever you do a clone from one drive to the other and you want to reboot the operating system check everything is working properly do this do not leave the old drive connected now i'm sure some people will tell you it's fine you can leave both the drives connected you can go into the bios and make sure you've got the right drive booting first which will be the ssd but this is the safest way to do it this absolutely guarantees the computer cannot see the hard drive it can only boot from the ssd so whenever i clone drives and set systems up this is what i do in a few minutes time we will be bringing the hard drive back into play as a spare data drive but for now this is what we need to boot things up we're going to be booting from the ssd so i'm now going to connect things up and we'll see if this works and here we are coming up again we've got a working computer that's good don't worry about the top square of information that's just because of the device that's recording from vga to hdmi to allow me to make this video anyway we're now going back all the resolution's changing again we're now going back into windows and this is all very good this is our first boot after we've changed the ssd windows might have a few little fits as it sorts things out it'll have to restore some of its temporary files but by not it should be okay the fact the computer is booting is obviously a very very welcome sign in fact it says welcome doesn't it on the screen to recognize it's welcome oh look windows wants to do some setting up stuff i don't want to do that windows go away don't we just hate the way windows does things like that but there we are we are clearly working there are clearly no issues here which is a rather good let's just open up this pc and oh we've got our dvd writer back again you can see we're working off the ssd because we've got the changing capacity from the hard drive we had connected earlier and i'm sure some of you want to know what has this done to the boot time of the pc so let's bring up a test comparing the boot with the hard drive fit in and now with the ssd fitted and start them off and we'll speed on through until the end of the post and bios stages here we are windows is just starting to load i think the ssd boot is very slightly in the lead i guess the drive didn't have to spin up and it's now loading windows i think significantly faster although the overall work time won't be very different yes there we are 39.5 seconds for the ssd boot compared to 45.5 for booting from the hard drive and you might remember before we added extra ram to this pc it initially booted in 47.1 seconds more broadly the pc is certainly a lot more responsive in terms of its feel having fitted the ssd i go to launch a large program i've recently installed which is normally quite a large execution and this comes up pretty rapidly as you can see this is that's pretty good for launching so i think we've obtained a reasonable performance improvement by fitting the ssd greetings having successfully migrated everything to the ssd we now need to decide what to do with the old hard drive one solution is to keep it as a backup as it contains a copy of everything now on the ssd so we could just leave the hard drive in the case but disconnected or we could take it out for safe keeping or we could move the hard drive to an external usb enclosure but what we're going to do is to reconnect the hard drive to use as additional storage in the computer alongside the ssd to do this we need to connect the drive to some power and as you may remember from a few minutes ago there are no spare sata power connectors in this computer on its power supply but we do have a spare molex power connector so what we're going to do is to take one of these which is a molex to sata power adapter and we're going to take this and plug it into the power connector we've got the molex power connector in our pc to plug in like that there we are we've now got sata power available which we can plug into the back of our drive like that and by the magic of filmmaking i've tidied things up a bit i've actually switched across which molex connect we've connected into i'm using this one not that one because it fitted a bit better and we now need to take a satter data cable and plug it first of all into the back of our drive like this there we are the hard drives now got our data cable again and then we need to plug this into one of the three sata ports on the motherboard like this and so with the hard drive now reconnected it's time to reboot the pc but it's important to stress we're going to reboot the pc first of all going into the bios so we can check on the boot order to make sure we are going to boot from the ssd and not the hard drive and so here we are booting up and i'm pressing the delete key to enter the bios on this system you might have to press a different key on your computer it might be the escape key or the f2 key different biases are different and different biases will look different when we arrive in them and if you want to know more about pc bios and pc bios settings i've got a video all about that anyway what we need to do here is to check on the boot order of our connected drives and exactly where this setting will be will again depend on your bios but i know in this particular bios it's down here in advanced bios features and if i click on that you'll see at the top we can select the hard disk boot priority reverse select enter on that you can see we're okay the first drive there is the gigabyte ssd and the one below is the western digital hard drive so it'll boot from the ssd and not the hard drive and if this were not the case we could use the page up and paste down keys here to move the orders of a drive around like that but i'll leave it obviously up where it wants to be so that's perfectly okay i can press escape to come out of this menu escape again escape again quit without saving yes and we'll reboot the computer and here we are back in windows where if we go to this pc we can see that yes we booted from the right drive we can tell by the capacity that is the ssd from c drive and the hard drive has mapped to a couple of drives because it's got multiple partitions on it so we want to do something about that so what we'll do is first of all go to this pc and right click and click on manage and then when this comes up we'll go to disk management where again we'll see our two drives there they are ssd at the top hard drive at the bottom and the obvious thing to do here would be to go into each of these partitions and to right click and do delete volume get rid of all of them create one new volume to use all the space on the hard drive for data storage but the problem with that is you can't right click on this final partition this is the windows recovery partition you can't get rid of it that easily so you could just leave it here get rid of these partitions add a new partition use that space but if you're feeling a bit more adventurous there is a better way to sort things out so we'll close this down we'll go down to a taskbar and we'll type in the search box disk part like that and then select this part to run the command it'll bring up a terminal in a second there we are and i have made the fonts a bit bigger here just so we can see more easily on the screen and if we type here list disk we will see the disks on the system again disk zero is rssd disk one is the hard drive and if i do a select disk one be very careful to get this right like that if i do a list disk again it'll show us we have selected indeed this one you can see it there and if i now do a clean it will remove everything from disk one all the formatting all the partitions everything so be very very careful when you're using diskpot and if you want to know more about this part guess what i've got a video all about that anyway if i enter clean like that that will hopefully be executed there we are and if we now shut this down and we go back to this pc and manage and back into disk management down there you will see it says you must initialize this disk because we've just got rid of everything that is fine so we'll take the defaults here that's a okay and we'll do an okay on that we've now got unallocated space on our hard drive we could right click it undo new simple volume follow through the wizard by clicking on next we'll take all the space next again we'll give it a volume label hdd to remind us what it is finish on that and there we are we've now got our new drive so we just close everything down go back to this pc we should hopefully find there we are we've got our ssd operating as our boot drive and we've got lots of free space available on the hard drive to use for whatever we want to use free space for now just before this film gets longer than ben hur i thought we'd finish off with a comparative test and so i've installed crystal disk mark on this system a nice piece of free software and first of all i thought we'd test out the hard drive on the system which of course was the boot drive until very recently so we'll run all the tests here on the hard drive there we are and now we'll freeze and split our screen and do the same test on the ssd and as we can see the ssd is clearly significantly faster particularly when it's reading and writing small files the sort of things which will speed up the operation of the operating system and it is clearly faster in terms of larger reads and writes almost double the speed of the hard drive but i'm sure some of you are surprised at how low these speeds are you might have been expecting speeds up towards 500 megabytes a second from an ssd connected via sata interface and it's therefore worth remembering as we saw in the first episode of this series that this pc is equipped with sata 2 which runs at 3 gigabits a second rather than sata three and that is why we're seeing speeds here for an ssd which are faster than the hard drive but not as fast as you see with an ssd on a modern system but i don't from that one to detract from the fact we've got a much much faster drive but i just thought it'd be interesting to share with you these performance tests as we've seen in this video upgrading your computer's boot drive to an ssd provides a useful performance boost and it remains one of the best upgrade options available for older hardware in my next video in this series we're going to move on to add some usb 3 ports to our old desktop pc but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you've seen here please press that like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and i hope to talk to you again very soon [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 445,516

Keywords: upgrading PC, PC upgrading, upgrading old PC, fitting SSD, upgrade hard drive to SSD, hard drive to SSD, clone hard drive, clone SSD, copy hard drive to SSD, HDD SDD upgrade, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt

Id: c8BaLpd69QI

Length: 25min 30sec (1530 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 07 2021