Solved Upgrade From HDD To SSD Questions.

Mitch · May 14, 2024

Hello, I recently did my first PC upgrade by replacing the RAM Modules, which went well. The invaluable advice I received from Forum members is much appreciated and helped greatly. I was advised that to get the best speed increase I should also upgrade the HDD to SSD, which is what I'm planning to do. The PC is a Windows 11 23H2 Dell Inspiron 15-5570 laptop with a 1TB HDD and am planning to replace this with, possibly a Samsung 1TB SSD. I have the paid version of Macrium Reflect which I use often, and would like to use this to clone the HDD disk before installing the new SSD. There is an option to delete partitions in the target disk in the cloning setup, but is it the case that everything on the new SSD, including partitions, is wiped as part of the cloning process, so do I need to do this before starting the process?

Can I also ask a question about Macrium Licence? If I want to remove the Macrium Licence from the PC temporarily in case I needed to do a Clean Install and the Licence would still be shown as "Used", does Reflect need to be uninstalled, or can I keep the program on the system, remove the Licence temporarily and re-licence it when finished, and if so, how is the Licence added back?
Would be grateful for any advice. Thanks.

Bree · May 14, 2024

Mitch said:
Hello, I recently did my first PC upgrade by replacing the RAM Modules, which went well. The invaluable advice I received from Forum members is much appreciated and helped greatly. I was advised that to get the best speed increase I should also upgrade the HDD to SSD, which is what I'm planning to do. The PC is a Windows 11 23H2 Dell Inspiron 15-5570 laptop with a 1TB HDD and am planning to replace this with, possibly a Samsung 1TB SSD. I have the paid version of Macrium Reflect which I use often, and would like to use this to clone the HDD disk before installing the new SSD. There is an option to delete partitions in the target disk in the cloning setup, but is it the case that everything on the new SSD, including partitions, is wiped as part of the cloning process, so do I need to do this before starting the process?

As you are using Reflect already, the simplest way would be to make one last image of the system with its HDD, replace it with the SSD, then boot from a Macrium rescue usb and restore the image to the SSD. The restore will wipe existing partitions (if any) on the target drive and overwrite them with the ones from the image.

Mitch said:
Can I also ask a question about Macrium Licence? If I want to remove the Macrium Licence from the PC temporarily in case I needed to do a Clean Install and the Licence would still be shown as "Used", does Reflect need to be uninstalled, or can I keep the program on the system, remove the Licence temporarily and re-licence it when finished, and if so, how is the Licence added back?

As the machine will still be exactly same device after the SSD upgrade there is no need to worry about the licence. Reflect will not see the upgrade from an HDD to an SSD as being a significant change.

Only if you were moving the image to a completely different PC would it be sensible to remove the licence from the source machine then install it on the new one. When you remove the licence key by default this will uninstall Reflect. If you un-tick that box what will be left is a 'Restore Only' version, no longer capable of making images.

hdmi · May 14, 2024

You can use Macrium Reflect to clone the old SATA HDD to a new NVMe SSD, directly, as the Dell Inspiron 15 5570 can actually support both a SATA drive and an NVMe SSD at once.

As you probably know, Macrium Reflect can automatically shrink/extend partitions to fill the target disk:

There is only one small caveat. Before the cloning starts, you need to run the below command from an elevated command prompt to make Windows load the StorNVMe driver instead of the StorAHCI driver:
sc config stornvme start= boot
(If you choose to reboot from the old SATA HDD after that, but before you start the cloning, then this setting will be reverted back so, then, you will need to run the command again, before the cloning starts.)

Finally, you should be able to change the boot order to make the laptop boot from the SSD instead of the HDD.

Mitch · May 14, 2024

Thanks very much for your replies. I think I will remove the HDD and replace it with the SSD - the HDD has become a bit noisy and I fear the worst. If its a straight swap, do I need to change anything in the BIOS/Boot Menu or should it boot directly from the SSD once installed?
Thanks again.

hdmi · May 14, 2024

Mitch said:
Thanks very much for your replies. I think I will remove the HDD and replace it with the SSD - the HDD has become a bit noisy and I fear the worst. If its a straight swap, do I need to change anything in the BIOS/Boot Menu or should it boot directly from the SSD once installed?
Thanks again.

The easiest fastest solution by far is to not remove the HDD until after you have successfully cloned it to the SSD like how I described. You don't necessarily have to put all the little screws back into the bottom cover of the laptop before the old HDD will finally be removed from it. (If you are lazy like me you can just leave the laptop standing on its lid with no bottom cover until you have verified that you can boot into Windows from the new SSD, lol)

Even if you already have an external drive with an image or clone that you could decide to restore or clone back onto the NVMe SSD, if you do that instead, then, after that, you'd still need to make Windows load the StorNVMe driver instead of the StorAHCI driver. Else, Windows won't be able to boot from the NVMe SSD due to the fact that you will have migrated Windows from SATA to NVMe. Granted, that would be just an easy fix. However, there's still not much point futzing around with an external drive when you don't really need to, as it is so much more convenient IMO to just clone the internal HDD directly onto the internal SSD, and remove the HDD only after everything works.

The Dell Inspiron 15 5570 can also support M.2 SATA SSDs, though, BUT... NVMe has been around for so many years by now, an M.2 SATA SSD is no longer really worth buying excepting only maybe if you can get one almost for free.

Mitch · May 14, 2024

Hi @hdmi Thanks very much for replying. I will take your advice. It seems that both Kingston and Crucial, who I've also been looking at use the Acronis software to clone the drive, but I use Macrium Reflect, which has always been solid, so I'll probably use that instead. As long as it gets the job done that's all that matters. Thanks again for your help. Jim.

hdmi · May 15, 2024

I don't know what specific 1TB model you had in mind from Samsung, but right now IMO you'd be better off getting the 1TB WD Blue SN580 at £68.57 instead. It's cheaper, and, it will generate less heat and consume less battery power than the 1TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus (or the 1TB Samsung 980 PRO) will. In addition to this, due to the fact that your laptop's internal M.2 NVMe slot is limited to PCIe 3.0, the difference in speed between these aforementioned NVMe SSDs will be pretty much negligible. These factors all add up, much to the point where the Samsungs can't really justify the price difference anymore currently.

Another worthy contender IMO right now would be the 1TB Crucial T500. However, even after you apply the £8 voucher from Amazon UK on it, it still costs more than the aforementioned WD Blue SN580. The only real advantage IMO would be if you are planning to upgrade your computer to PCIe 4.0 in a not-too-distant future, as doing that would vastly improve the sustained sequential read/write speed that you'd effectively be getting from the T500, whereas with the SN580 this improvement would be noticeably much smaller then.

Even so, "sustained sequential read/write speed" only actually starts to matter noticeably during certain specific tasks, like, e.g., copying (very) large amounts of data to/from something like, e.g., another internal SSD that also is characterised by the ability to sustain similar (high) sequential read/write speed. That is, the kind of large data transfers that tend to take a bit longer than just the blink of an eye, and that aren't held back by anything much besides the maximum sequential read/write speed that the storage hardware in question is capable to sustain. So, mainly as a result, for most users, either it doesn't matter at all usually or it only matters to a small degree. Especially for laptop users, power and heat very often tend to be among the (comparatively) much more important variables to want to take into consideration here, albeit right now the T500 certainly is among the absolute best possible choices in that department as well. Still, the same also holds true about the SN580.

werty · May 15, 2024

I confirm that the Crucial T500 NVMe is a great choice. It runs pretty cool in my laptop- around 32°C. The performance is nearly the rated one around 7000 MB/s for both sequential read and write.

Mitch · May 15, 2024

Thanks for the reply. I was looking at using Macrium Reflect to clone our existing HDD to SSD (which I have). One thing I'm not clear about is when the existing HDD is cloned to the new SSD which is connected by SATA to USB, the C drive in the HDD is replaced by Drive F in the cloned SSD in the Macrium tutorial. I would imagine that's because both are connected to the laptop. Once the SSD is installed do we need to change the OS drive letter from F back to C and if so, what's the best way to do this? Thanks. Mitch.

Bree · May 15, 2024

Mitch said:
Once the SSD is installed do we need to change the OS drive letter from F back to C...

No, Windows will always give the drive it has booted from the letter C, regardless of any letter it may have had while you made the clone.

RD Mercer · May 15, 2024

hdmi said:
I don't know what specific 1TB model you had in mind from Samsung, but right now IMO you'd be better off getting the 1TB WD Blue SN580 at £68.57 instead. It's cheaper,

That drive in the 500 Gig is $59.00 in the US.

Amazon.com

Mitch · May 15, 2024

Thanks everyone. This PC is our 4th machine that we just use for general use so doesn't need to be blisteringly fast (just faster than now!) so we opted for Crucial BX500 which is a decent price, at least here in the UK. Thanks @Bree for clearing that up. I suppose the drive letter F to C is done automatically so one less thing to do. I imagine in Reflect I should select "delete partitions on target disk" before starting the clone to get rid of anything pre installed on the drive.Thanks again. Appreciate your help.

hdmi · May 15, 2024

RD Mercer said:
That drive in the 500 Gig is $59.00 in the US.

Amazon.com

On Amazon US, the 1TB Samsung NVMe SSDs are like this:

990 EVO	$89.99
980	$93.90
970 EVO Plus	$97.00
980 PRO	$106.13
990 PRO	$110.08

...whereas the 1TB WD Blue SN580 is $71.38 so, it definitely is cheaper AFAIK.

Froggie · May 15, 2024

Mitch said:
I imagine in Reflect I should select "delete partitions on target disk" before starting the clone to get rid of anything pre installed on the drive.Thanks again.

Not needed, Macrium takes care of all of that...

RD Mercer · May 15, 2024

hdmi said:
On Amazon US, the 1TB Samsung NVMe SSDs are like this:

990 EVO $89.99
980 $93.90
970 EVO Plus $97.00
980 PRO $106.13
990 PRO $110.08

...whereas the 1TB WD Blue SN580 is $71.38 so, it definitely is cheaper AFAIK.

Yeah, I'm a Samsung "Fan Man"

haven't been able to break the habit, may not be able to do this on my own, may need some help from a psychiatrist...

Steve C · May 16, 2024

I always do HDD to SSD transfers in Reflect using imaging rather than cloning as discussed in post 2.

glasskuter · May 16, 2024

I completely agree with some of the others...restoring an image to the new drive is the way to go. Macrium does it all for you. Remove the hdd, install the ssd, boot from Macrium recovery media and restore the image by dragging each partition from the image file onto the new drive . Once completed, if the system will not boot, boot back into the Macrium recovery media and select "Fix Boot Problems" If your ssd is the same size as your hdd, recovery is a snap.

Note: If your ssd is larger than the hdd, and you want to use all the extra space for your C: partition, you can manually resize your C partition to include the extra space during the recovery process and then drag the C : partition from the image file into it. Another option is to leave the partitions the same size and create another partition in the unallocated space after recovery.

Mitch · May 16, 2024

That's great. Really appreciate all the help.
My first attempt at PC upgrade so I'll take on board all the comments and suggestions. Thanks again.

Mitch · Sunday at 8:55 AM

Hi. I will be replacing the HDD on our Dell Inspiron 15-5570 laptop with a Crucial SSD and would be grateful for some clarification. In addition to the 1TB HDD, there is also a 16GB Intel Mempek 1J016GAD Optane disk currently installed. I did a clean install of Windows 11 several months ago and changed the SATA configuration from RAID to AHCI. Dell says to disable the optane memory before removing the HDD by searching for "Intel Rapid Storage Technology, Click IRST and on the Intel Optane memory click Disable, then reboot". When I do the above no results are found.
Is it the case that when I changed from RAID to AHCI, this was disabled before? I'm attaching a screenshot of Disk Management. Would appreciate any advice. Thanks.