The PROPER Steps to Cloning and Replacing your M.2 NVME SSD Hard Drive! See Pinned Comment!

what's up everybody it is Dan cam you know and I am back with another tutorial and today I'm going to be showing you how to clone and replace the current m.2 nvme SSD hard drive that's in your system with a brand new one so this is going to be the hard drive in your system that has Windows on it your current boot drive then at the end of the video I'll also show you how to clean up and completely erase all the contents on the drive that you're going to be cloning and guys this video is pretty long and some parts of the video may not apply to your specific situation so skim through and use the chapters down below to find all the information you need but I feel that there's a lot of good information a lot of the chapters so I recommend watching all the way through but you can skip through if you want but guys without further Ado let's go ahead and let's get into it [Music] foreign guys so let's get into what you're going to need and a few notes on this process so firstly you're going to need a new hard drive duh would be kind of important it's probably why you're watching this video you got a new hard drive but we got our new hard drive down here and then there's two ways to clone your current boot drive over to your new one so I've got an nvme m.2 Drive so on some motherboards they have one m.2 nvme slot some have poo some have three some have four so if you have more than one what you can do is you can plug your new Drive into one of the empty slots on your motherboard and then you can clone the current drive over to this one or a lot of motherboards only have one slot so if that's the case you can't just plug this in to an open one and clone it over so what you're going to need is an m.2 nvme enclosure or if you're using a 2.5 inch SSD or a 3.5 inch HDD they do make different enclosures for that so you can basically plug in your new hard drive into the enclosure then with one of the included cables this one has a USBC to USBC and then a USBC to a USB type A so you basically plug in your new drive into the enclosure and then from there you can use one of the provided cables to plug that into an available USBC or USB type a port and then by doing that the computer recognizes it as an additional hard drive and then you can go ahead and begin the cloning process so that's actually all you're going to need and even if you have an available m.2 slot one of these is super clutch because if the drive that's currently in your system you might not need it or you're not planning to use it you can actually use this as an external hard drive so once that hard drive is out of the system I'm going to go ahead and plug it into here and then it's got um I don't have them with me right here but it's got heat pads so it'll keep the m.2 nvme nice and cool and then I'm just going to leave an enclosure and it's going to be an external hard drive an extremely fast external hard drive so I went I went with one of these enclosures and it's not too expensive so even if you have an open m.2 slot it's a really good idea to pick one of these up because you never know when you're going to need it and it's a good thing just to kind of have I think it was like 18 so it's not too expensive so that's all you're going to need so let's jump over into a few notes on this install so on to a few notes for the process so the first one is that for my machine I'm going from a gen 3 one terabyte nvme drive over to a Gen 4 2 terabyte hard drive so this hard drive is obviously a larger capacity and the read and write speeds for this thing are absolutely crazy Gen 4 hard drives have come down majorly in price which is the main reason why I went with this guy so because this is a larger Drive even if that one terabyte drive was completely full of information obviously all the contents for that will fit on this one so it makes the cloning process easy because everything will fit over but if for some reason you're going from a large capacity drive to a smaller one you obviously want to make sure the contents of your old drive are going to fit on your new one and it does make the process in macrium reflect which is the program we're going to be using a little bit different and I'll go ahead and Link a video down below if you're doing it that route if you're going from a larger capacity to a smaller capacity for some reason so just keep that in mind that if you've got a one terabyte drive and you're going to like a 512 gigabyte obviously all the contents of that are not going to fit on the 512 so just be mindful of that um the next note I want to make I've got some notes over here you're not going to need a new copy of Windows we're basically doing a complete clone so this drive is just going to be a complete clone of that drive so Windows all everything I have stored on there is going to be on here so you will not need a new copy of windows and also another note is if you're a little afraid of this process or you feel like you're going to mess something up it's never a bad idea to back up your data so if you're worried you're going to mess up the drive or something's going to happen go ahead and back up your data just to be safe it's never a bad idea to do a full backup of your data and the last note I want to make is for this one we're doing an m.2 nvme drive but this will actually work for any kind of drive so if your boot Drive is on a 2.5 inch SSD or even on a 3.5 inch HDD a mechanical Drive this process will work but if you're going to like from a 3.5 inch to a 2.5 inch drive or 2.5 inch to an nvme drive you may have to go into your bios and change the boot priority because it's most likely going to want to boot to whatever old drive you had so just keep that in mind we're going from a smaller to a larger capacity drive you will not need a new copy of windows it's never a bad idea to back up your data and this process will basically work for any kind of boot drive that you'll be copying so on that note I think we covered just about everything so let's go ahead and let's start getting into the process of cloning my old hard drive okay guys so scenario one is if you're going to be using an enclosure to do this process so we've got our enclosure right here and we're gonna go ahead and open it and then on this side you can see this is where our m.2 nvme is going to plug into we've got um three different length holes depending on how long your hard drive is and then with this enclosure we've got a little heat pad that you should use if you're going to make this a permanent solution so if it's going to live in this enclosure probably permanently I would consider using the heat pad if you're just doing a transfer I'd probably still recommend doing it but it's not as vital as if it's going to be living in there all the time so like I said this is the hard drive that I'm going to be installing it has a built-in heatsink so it makes this process with the enclosure a little awkward and then I also do have a normal nvme drive that I can show you the process too so let's show you how it's going to be for my drive that I'm installing if anybody just decides to go this exact route so we've got our enclosure we're just going to kind of put it at a little bit of an angle and then all we're going to do is you can see it's it's lined up right there and then all we're going to do is just push it into place and then this is how I'm going to plug the enclosure into my system so we're going to use the included USB type A because my my case currently does not have a USBC connection so this is what's going to get plugged into my system and then we can start the cloning process but let's just say your hard drive doesn't have a heatsink it's going to be pretty much the same process and I would highly recommend following your manual because your enclosure may be different than mine so just follow this pretty much to a T So for a temporary solution you can just grab your drive and just plug it in and then so now that's in you could just do it like this and the um this should be okay you may want to monitor the temps of it just to be sure but how you're supposed to install it in the closure is it's going to come with this little brass fitting and the nvme is going to slide into the middle of this brass fitting so let's let me show you this so we've got the edge of our m.2 right here and our brass fitting is just going to fit in there let's see come on so that's how it's going to look right there so what we're going to do now is we're going to grab our little screw and then it's in the back you can see right where my index finger is that's where it's going to plug in or screw in so I got that let's just screw this in I'm holding this at a very awkward angle see if I can get this so there we go it's screwing in and I apologize if this is not like fully focused so the drive is in secured and then what you're going to do is you're going to use your heat pad and then once the heat pad is installed you can slide the enclosure over and then you're good to go so that would be as if you're permanently installing in here and it's probably a good idea to do that even for this because who knows how long it's going to take to copy all of your stuff over it shouldn't be too long but to be safe you want to use this heat pad and then you can slide the enclosure over and then use one of the provided cables to uh plug it into the computer okay so I think I pretty much showed you everything for this scenario so let's go ahead and jump into scenario two whereas if you have an open slot on your motherboard okay guys so scenario two is going to be if you have an open m.2 nvme slot on your motherboard so first take a look at my system you can see that the graphics card has been removed I went ahead and removed it and I'm not going to go through this process because I did an entire video on how to uninstall your drivers for your GPU remove and install your new graphics card and I'll go ahead and Link that in the top right if you need help with removing that because you'll notice on my machine the open m.2 slot down here is actually underneath my graphics card so I had to remove it in order to get access to this so now that we've got access to it the only thing you really need to keep an eye out for is it most likely will be installed on your motherboard already but you need to have a standoff right here so depending on the length of your hard drive you need to have a standoff in there and then you need to have this screw that goes with the standoff so this is how we're going to secure the drive to the motherboard and it's going to screw in to this standoff that's been installed down here and I'll get better pictures of this and I'll throw them up on the screen with this so like I said this is the drive that's going to be going in to the system that's replacing my current boot drive but here is a drive that does not have a heatsink so they're basically identical you can see they have the same slots right here and that's what secures the drive to the motherboard standoff but they're basically identical this one is Gen 3 this one's Gen 4 but I mean they're pretty much identical with everything else so I'll show you the drive that's going in it's the same process as the other one so let me get this to focus down here and then on our um receiving end I'll call it our connection for the hard drive you'll see that it um it slides in nice and easy and you just want to line up this notch on here with this connection on the board so we're gonna do is come down here line up those connections and then I'm kind of far away so it's a little difficult for me to do this so boom that just clicked in nice and easily and then our um Drive is sitting against the standoff so we're going to grab our small screw again and I know that didn't Focus for you but let's just go ahead screw this in and then our drive is installed and we're ready to reinstall the graphics card and begin the cloning process so let me take this out there we go and then I'm going to take this drive out and then obviously this one is going to be pretty much the same method the only thing I would consider is using a heat sink when using this one in because this is going to be directly underneath the graphics card and even though we're not technically using the graphics card and you're not going to be it's not going to be pumping out a ton of heat it's still a good idea because it's directly under it so um strongly consider using a heatsink if you're going to plug this in but I'll show you this one real quick same exact process line it up with the holes on the port and then what you're going to do is you're going to grab your little screw again and then we're just gonna this one you might have to push down the drive a little bit you can see it's got a little bit of movement so just hold it down screw it in and this will secure the drive to the motherboard and then like I said guys you want to use a heatsink for these things they run really warm so I think that's going to do it so let's move on to the next process and that's booting it up with either the enclosure with your new drive in it or with your new Drive in your open slot okay guys we are now taking a look at my desktop and as of right now we have our new m.2 nvme Drive either plugged into an open slot on our motherboard or we have it plugged into the nvme enclosure and that nvme enclosure is connected to the computer by the included type c cable or the type a cable my motherboard and my case actually do not have a type c connection so I am using type A but I'd always recommend using type c if you can because it'll actually clone a little bit faster but type A will work just fine if you don't have a type c connection so now that our new Drive is connected to the PC the first thing we're going to want to do is right click our start button and we're going to go to Disk Management and once we do you're going to be met with this prompt right here that says initialize disk and then all we're going to do is Select OK and then once you do we're actually done in Disk Management and then if you scroll down right here we can see our unallocated disk that we're going to be cloning to so this is my boot drive this is my mass storage and this is the drive that's plugged into the motherboard or our nvme closure this is our new drive so we don't need to do anything else in Disk Management I'm just showing you my current drives so let's exit out here and then let's go to our browser of choice and go to our search engine of choice and type in macrium reflect and then once you do the first option is going to be macrium.com and this is going to be the software that we're going to use to do this cloning process and it is completely free and this program is awesome I love it it works super well so let's go ahead and click into here and then once you do we're going to scroll down a little bit and you're going to see reflect 8 free so you're going to go ahead and download it install it and there's nothing really special about the install process there's no options you really need to look out for just go ahead and install it select all the prompts and then once you do you're good to go and we're going to close out of our browser and I created a desktop icon to make it easy so let's go ahead and click on macrium reflect so that's going to go ahead and open let me make sure my webcam stop blocking okay um so looking at macquarium reflect we don't need to do anything up here we're just going to focus down here and my first piece of advice would be to write down each of your drives and what they're called you can see it's a super long name but just for the cloning process and especially later if you're planning on erasing the drive that you're cloning like the one that's coming out I would recommend riding down the drive so if you erase it you do not erase the wrong one so for future use and it's just good knowledge to have which Drive is which and what it's called I would highly recommend just going through and just kind of noting down which Drive is which so let's go through mine so you can see when I click on the middle one um or look at the middle one you can see that it's one terabyte we've got this Windows icon right here so this is the drive that my Windows operating system is currently installed on and this top one is our two terabyte 2.5 inch SATA SSD that I have and this one's actually going to be phased out pretty soon um I'd probably be getting rid of this and putting it in another system so just keep an eye on which Drive is which and know which Drive is which so you clone the right one first of all and then later on like I said if you're planning on erasing any of the drives to clean it up you want to know which Drive is which so this is our boot drive this is our mass storage and then this is the new drive you can see it's completely empty there's nothing on here so what we're going to do is select the drive that we want to clone and that's going to be this middle one and just make sure you double check that this Windows operating system icon's there so that is our current boot drive and we're going to go ahead and select clone this disk and that's going to bring up this pop-up and so we have our source drive and then the destination drive so this is the drive we're going to be cloning and then this is the disc that we're going to clone to so what we're going to do is select um a disk to clone two little prompt right here and then that's going to bring up these two drives so these are the two drives we can copy to so we don't want to copy it onto our mass storage we want to copy it onto our new one so we're going to go ahead and select this one and then like I said double check this triple check this multiple times to make sure you're cloning the right one but once you've got that all figured out and you're good to go go ahead and click here so this is going to select all partitions on this drive so it's going to copy everything that is um on my current boot drive and that's going to copy everything onto here so once we do that we can go ahead and click next and we don't need to schedule the Clone you can if you want to but I'm not going to go over that so let's go ahead and click next and then this will just show you a cloning summary of which one you're cloning and the four partitions and all that good stuff but now we're going to go ahead and click finish and then once you do it's going to say what do you want to do now just go ahead and leave this all how it is and then once you click OK it's going to take you through the cloning process and it may take a while um so just keep that in mind and I'd recommend just leaving your PC idle and not doing anything on the PC just just leave it how it is don't chat don't touch it and just wait for it to finish so let's go ahead and select ok okay guys so the Clone is about to finish right now and as soon as it's done it's going to give you the time it took and you're just going to go ahead and click OK and then once you do you can go ahead and click close within macrium reflect and we are good to go the drive is completely cloned so now comes the part where we swap out our old SSD for the new one foreign guys so the cloning process has finished and it was successful and one thing I didn't mention is you're going to want to make sure you disconnect this hard drive properly and to do that before removing it from the PC you're going to go down into your task tray in the bottom right and you're going to see a little icon that kind of looks like a flash drive and you're going to want to go ahead and right click on that and then you're going to want to eject that hard drive and then once you do that you can go ahead and remove the nvme enclosure from your PC because if you just just rip this out of the PC without doing that it could cause issues so just make sure you do it the proper way and eject the hard drive before removing the enclosure from a USB port so guys just to give you an idea of time it took me about four hours to completely clone this drive and I have about 600 gigabytes worth of data so I'd recommend going through your system and maybe uninstalling some programs or games you're not currently using I had about 200 gigabytes of games that I'm not currently playing so I should have deleted those before doing this process but I was thinking about the video so it took me about four hours to fully finish this process so guys the time has come to finally put our new drive into the system so let's cut over that then we'll boot it up and then there's a couple more things I want to show you but let's go ahead and Swap this bad boy over thank you guys so we are back in my desktop and everything is working smoothly and like I said in my little note um in that Past clip the first boot might take a little bit longer than normal but all boots after that should be completely normal speed it took me maybe about five or ten seconds longer than my normal boots but every boot after that was normal speed so that's completely normal if you see it's kind of struggling and taking a while to load and then as you can see by the drive that came out it's solely working off of the Clone drive so everything was successful all of my files are here we're good to go but there is one more thing we need to do so I'm going to show you something real quick and what we're going to do is right click on your start menu button and we're going to go to Disk Management like we did earlier let me bring this up here and then if you look here you can see our my 2.5 inch SATA SSD drive and then we've got our new drive down here but you can see there's actually a problem so only one terabyte is able to be used then we have one terabyte of unallocated space so you can see that there's a recovery partition in here that we want to keep but you can see it's sandwiched in between so that actually generates a problem because normally you're able to right click on your C partition and then you can do extend this volume and then it will occupy all of that unallocated space but Windows is stupid Disk Management is stupid and it sandwiches it in between and you can't move it from here so that creates a problem so we unfortunately have to rely on some third-party software and once again it is free to use um and super simple so I'll go over that so let's go ahead and close out a Disk Management and I'll show you what to do next so we can move this recovery partition over to the right and then we can extend this volume so let's go ahead and exit out of Disk Management and then what you're going to want to do is uh type in mini tool Partition Wizard and then that's going to bring you this search result and there are a ton of programs that do this for free but I decided to go with this one so you're going to go to this website and you're going to download it and install it and guys this program is a little spammy there are some ads because it is free so as soon as you're done using it you can delete it but you might get some pop-ups unfortunately but it works really really well and they do have a pro version but unless you're using it you know frequently um the free one works just fine so download it install it I'm not going to show the install process but there are I would kind of look out through the process for some box to check in some box to uncheck because some of them they'll check it in for you but it's like a program you might not need so I would just recommend downloading mini tool Partition Wizard the free version so once you get that installed and you're ready to go I'm gonna go ahead and close out of my browser and we're going to go ahead and launch mini tool partition and then once we do you can see it looks very similar to Disk Management we've got our two drives right here and there is a disclaimer I want to make um I would strongly recommend keeping this available so just in case you make a mistake or something happens you can always go back to this drive which has all of your files on it and windows so just in case you make a mistake or something happens or the power goes out while you're doing this or something crazy happens you have a backup and you can plug this back in and you can clone this back over to the drive again if you need to so hold on to this or if you want to you can make a complete backup of your system um like I said it's always good to do a backup before something like this so just keep that in mind keep this handy just in case you make a mistake or God forbid something happens and you corrupt Windows or who knows what might happen so keep a backup ready or the drive that you originally cloned okay so getting to mini tool Partition Wizard we can see our drives down here and once again we can see the recovery partition sandwiched between our C partition and then our unallocated space so it's super simple to move this to the right and extend this volume so we're going to click on the partition first then we're going to go to move resize partition so go ahead and click on this and then what you're going to do is you're going to drag the slider all the way over to the right and then once you click ok you can see it is now over to the right and then these changes aren't permanent as of right now if you made a mistake or move the wrong one you can always click undo and it will take you back to square one it's only when you click apply that these settings will be set in stone so just keep that in mind so now we've got our recovery partition over to the right and you can see we finally got our unallocated space next to our drive so what we're going to do now is Click our C partition and then we're going to go back into move resize partition and then instead of moving this one we're actually going to drag this slider right here to fully extend it so grab the arrow and then bring it all the way out and then you can see we're finally going to get all of our space so just make sure you're at the very end and you're good to go and then once you do go ahead and click OK and you can see our volume has been completely extended the partition is over to the right and it won't cause any issues and we're good to go so once you do that you're going to go ahead and click apply and it's going to give you a little disclaimer here if I remember properly so click apply then it says apply pending changes no we strongly recommend you close all other applications before you apply the changes um so close out of all apps just in case something happens just to make sure this process goes through so I'm going to go ahead and apply them and it's going to do its thing applied all the pending changes successfully so we can go ahead and click OK and then we're going to exit out of this we're going to restart our computer and then we're going to go into Disk Management and make sure the changes actually took place so I'm going to go ahead and do that now and I'll meet you guys back at the desktop in about two seconds all right dude so I am back from the restart so let's go ahead and open Disk Management and make sure all the changes took place so once again right click on your start menu button click Disk Management and this time around we should see that we have our full drive here the volume extended with no issues and we still have our recovery partition so the process worked fine so if you want you can go ahead and remove mini tool Partition Wizard I'm probably going to I don't use it that often so everything worked out great guys so now we have this extra Drive um and I don't really need any of the information on it anymore because it's on that drive so in the next segment I'm going to show you how to completely erase all the contents on this drive properly so let's go ahead and let's get into that okay guys so we are finally getting to the last part of this video and what we're gonna do now is we're going to completely erase and clean the original drive that was in my system um so my original hard drive that we cloned is in my enclosure now and it is plugged into the computer or like we're talking about earlier you can plug your old SSD into an open slot on the motherboard and then taking a look at my Disk Management we can see my new hard drive set up here so we've got disk one which is my new hard drive you can see two terabytes are available and then disc two is now my old SSD that is plugged into the enclosure but you can see it's still got our Windows partitions on it and our recovery partition so we want to get rid of all this and doing it through Disk Management isn't the best and even if you try to right click on it and delete it it just does not work so I'm going to show you a better method to completely wipe it out and get rid of all partitions so what we're going to do is we're actually going to get out of Disk Management so go ahead and close it then you're going to go down to your search bar down here and you're going to type CMD for your command prompt and you're going to go over here and run it as administrator so once you do that it's going to bring up this prompt right here and what you're going to do is you're going to type d-i-s-k-p-a-r-t for disk part so once you click enter it's going to take a second and then you'll have a disk part little prompt right here and what you're going to do is list disk so this is going to show you all of the available drives right now so we've got disk 0 which is my mass storage my 2.5 inch SATA SSD we've got disk one which is my new two terabyte boot drive that we spent all this time cloning onto and then disk two is the drive we want to erase and like I was saying earlier guys knowing which Drive is which is incredibly important because if you select the wrong driver here you'll completely clean the wrong drive and I do not want you to completely wipe your system by accident um so just know which Drive you're selecting when you go to those do this next process because it's irreversible you cannot get this data back so just make sure that you're paying attention so I know for sure it's disk 2 because it's as of right now it's the only one terabyte one that is showing so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and click select SEL space d-i-s-k 2. so disk 2 is now the selected drive and then all we're going to do right now is we're going to type in clean and then we're going to click enter and it is going to completely clean this drive so let's go ahead and click enter it's going to do its thing it may take a bit let's see how long this takes so we're done so disk part succeeded in cleaning the disk so disk 2 is completely erased we have fully erased all the contents on our old hard drive so let's go ahead and type in exit to get out of disk part so leaving this part and we are now back at just our normal command prompt prompt so we're going to go ahead and exit out of here and then what you're going to do now is you're actually going to go back into Disk Management and then as soon as you open Disk Management let me actually that's okay um just want to make sure it wasn't blocked so you can see now we have to initialize disk two it's reading it as a brand new Drive there's no partitions on it so what you're going to do is Select GPT it should already be Auto selected but go ahead and select ok then once you do let me just expand this a little bit to make it easier to see so now we've got one terabyte of unallocated space so the easiest way to do this is just go ahead and click the drive right click it click new simple volume click next click next and then you can assign it a letter if you want to I'm just going to name it e because it makes sense for my system I have a c d and now an e so go ahead and click next and then just leave this all as it is it should be all okay as it is click next go ahead and click finished and then boom we have our drive it is fully ready to go and it's still currently formatting but now it is finished and we have our new volume e it's completely erased all of that original content is gone and it it's on our new cloned drive so guys we're good to go we finally finished everything I know it's a long video but there's a lot of things to show and I wanted to be as accurate as possible and slow and concise to make it easy for you guys so now that we're done um if you want to go ahead and eject the disk you can go ahead and right click on your flash drive icon down here and then you can eject my uh enclosures called the ssk so you can inject this and then you can remove your storage and then now you have a portable extremely fast SSD drive so super clutch to have um but yeah guys that's gonna do it for the video so let's go ahead and get into the outro all right guys well that's going to do it for today's video I hope it was informative and if it was please drop a like And subscribe I have a ton of content that is very similar to this so check out my channel if you want to see that and guys if you have any questions or concerns about anything in this video please comment down below I answer a hundred percent of my comments so if there's any processes that didn't seem clear or I didn't explain well enough just comment down below and I'll do my best to get back to you as soon as I can so I can help you out so once again guys thank you so much for watching I hope you guys all have a great day and I'll see y'all in the next video

Channel: DanKamYouKnow

Views: 68,646

Keywords: PC, PC Gaming, Gaming, Setup, Gaming Setup, PC Setup, DIY, Desktop, Desk, AMD, Ryzen, Intel, Corsair, Phanteks, Noctua, Headset, Keyboard, Gaming Mouse, Gaming Keyboard, CPU, PSU, Console, GPU, Graphics Card, Samsung, Acer, Logitech, Funko, Prebuild, Prebuilt, PC case, Speakers, Mouse, Mousepad, Amp, DAC, Cooler Master, Homall, Wireless, Wireless mouse, Wireless keyboard, Capture Card, RAM, Memory, Fans, PC Fans, EK, liquid cooler, AIO 240mm, 120mm, PC fan, 360mm, M.2, NVME, SSD, M.2 NVME, Hard drive, Cloning, Clone

Id: yNgMl5zK09E

Length: 37min 7sec (2227 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 11 2022