Another HDD>SSD Migration question

I have a new refubished HP desktop, $99, dual core 3mhz, 2gb ram, 80gb HDD, Windows 7. I got it to handle bittorrent and various binary newsgroup stuff. It does suprisingly well with RARing and PARing and ZIPing, etc but I figure an SSD should be even better. I ordered a Kingston HyperX 3K SH103S3/120G 2.5" 120GB SATA III MLC and was wondering how to do the migration.

Having looked around, it seems that simply using the Windows 7 backup and restore should actually do the alignment and trim settings by itself. But the 80 gb drive has that restore partition and I don't know if the Windows utility will bring that along as well. I'm not sure I even want that partition but it may be useful someday.

Should I go with Clonezilla (or something else) that will handle the whole drive, or maybe the Win7 backup will handle it? I don't think the BIOS actually deals with the restore partition but there may be a "Press F4 to restore" but I'm not at the machine now to check. There IS an option, from the bootloader I guess, to boot into Windows 7 or Restore.

Any advice appreciated.

you could just go with one of the samsung SSD upgrade kits they come with software/hardware depending on the kit you get to clone the existing drive you have.
otherwise i have used both norton ghost and acronis backup for cloning a drive.

I don't see the Samsung upgrade kit without buying a Samsung SSD. Is that a prereq?

dgk said:

I don't see the Samsung upgrade kit without buying a Samsung SSD. Is that a prereq?

Click to expand...

yea unfortunately the kit comes with a samsung SSD,some of there kits come with a usb(think its the kit sold for laptops but can be used on any) so you can clone the drive then just swap them out, format the old drive and set to storage.

I tried with the Windows7 backup/restore utility. I created a rescue disk and a system image. Then I installed the SSD and booted off the rescue disk. I did the restore and then booted off the SSD. The system and restore partition were both there but Win 7 created the partition the same size as the source disk, 80 gb so there were 40 left unallocated on the SSD. A quick partition expand using some free partition manager took care of that.

The partition offset was 4096, which is correct so Win 7 handled that. All in all, a pretty easy operation.

I suggest migrating to SATA III if you wanna go the SSD way.

I think the drive is Sata III but it's a $99 refurb computer so I doubt the MB is capable. It is noticably quicker than it was. Boots almost instantaneously and unrar, par, etc go faster.