Anyone here have experience with migrating HD to SSD?

Discussion in 'General' started by Polyesta, Dec 23, 2016.

  1. Polyesta

    Polyesta Member

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    How hard or difficult is it to switch all your files over to SSD?
    Have windows start up off SSD?
    Are disc performance speeds actually that much faster compared to regular disk drive?
     
  2. VulcanStorm

    VulcanStorm Developer Staff Member Moderator

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    Sadly I have no experience migrating from HD to SSD.

    Win10 does boot off an ssd. But then i got my laptop with win10 installed on the ssd... But it should work like any regular hard disk...

    But i can say that SSD is massively faster than HD. SSDs use less power (good for laptops). As for loading times... Yes, SSDs are faster, much faster read and write than a HD. But by how much depends on the exact HD you're using.
     
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  3. JustGoFly

    JustGoFly Member

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    Assuming you are running Windows: I installed an SSD, it goes in as a new hard drive. Then you just install your steam games to that new drive instead of C:
    The performance improvement should be during map load time, but I haven't noticed any major improvement. It can't be sure but Empires seems to download every map, every game. If that's the case, then that would account for the no-improvement.

    I set mine up as Z: so it never moves. I hate when you setup a drive as D: and then plug in a thumb drive and you have to remap all the drives again.

    http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2404258,00.asp
     
  4. Polyesta

    Polyesta Member

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    I don't need it for Empire's I actually have a decent HD, (I have an actually pretty nice system I just wanna steroid it) I'm just sick of projects that get narratively speaking- huge take some time to load. OR when I boot up my PC it takes about 5 minute's to fully load my desktop. (Which has dozens of APPS/Folders/Projects/Junk). Sometime's web browsing and navigation will slow down to a'few seconds twenty second load time. Rarely longer if I have alot of stuff running and depending on said things. Stuff like that.
     
  5. Polyesta

    Polyesta Member

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    As far as I know, maybe its because you don't have SSD setup to run windows and you're PC as you're just using it as an extra drive, I mean to literally flip my BIOS/W7/Everything to a SSD.
     
  6. Lazybum

    Lazybum :D Staff Member Moderator

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    You can clone your current drive to another drive, doesn't matter if it's ssd or whatever as long as it has the capacity to hold it and probably the same file system. I haven't had a need to do it yet, but it's pretty easy and straight forward, just google it. Once you do that just set your bios to launch the ssd instead of the hd.

    Personally I would format the drive hard disk drive after you clone it, it's not like you need a backup windows install and it kinda sucks having windows eat all that drive space. I've had problems too before about having multiple windows install, though it was mostly it booting the wrong drive or hearing occasional complaints about "can't find something", because I think it would install windows crap to the wrong hard drive. Simply deleting the windows folder wasn't enough, so format is usually the only way to deal with it. This was back with xp, I dunno if it's better now, but it still frees up space you could be using.
     
  7. Polyesta

    Polyesta Member

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    Shanks
     
  8. Tama

    Tama Developer Staff Member Web Developer

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    I did this a few months ago. I used `dd if=/old/drive of=/new/ssd` running off a linux live usb stick (when copying it is advised not to have either source or destination mounted, as you might copy over a part of the disk that is being written to)

    In fact, I did the same again last night, to get a backup on my other SSD.
     
  9. Polyesta

    Polyesta Member

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    Interesting. So should I just save all my valuable files around "120gbs" on to a flash drive USB stick remove everything, wipe my drive clean after copying basic windows 64b to my SSD then set up the parameters in BIOS to load windows off my SSD drive and have my old drive set as an extra drive. I mean I watched several videos on how to do it. How long doe's cloning a drive actually take?
     
  10. A-z-K

    A-z-K Member

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    Copy media files off to another hard disk and get your used space on hdd down so it is under the capacity of the ssd.

    Then use acronis, or ghost or whatever to clone the HD to the ssd and shrink the partition size accordingly.

    Change the boot order in bios to prioritise the ssd.

    Profit.
     
  11. ViroMan

    ViroMan Black Hole (*sniff*) Bully

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    Or say F' it and do a fresh install. If you are using a SSD as your main drive its best to do a fresh install for that switching your bios to UEFI startup. Win 7 and up are best for UEFI startup modes.
    I did the copy over shtick first and it operated... "OK" but, then I read a few articles saying a UEFI fresh install works wonders. It fucking did. I reinstalled everything and the startup is much faster then the copy over startup time. Who knows maybe it was just random crap slowing down my computer. What I do know though is that UEFI startup is supposedly "safer" against rootkits.
     
  12. Polyesta

    Polyesta Member

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    So basically do a computer factory reset and reinstall windows on just SSD.

    EDIT*

    While saving my valuable files on my 120gb flash drive.
     
  13. ViroMan

    ViroMan Black Hole (*sniff*) Bully

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    Why save your stuff when all you have to do is disconnect the the HDD and leave it in there while you plug in the new SSD. When the install is finished plug in the old HDD. The UEFI setting in bios will auto pick the SSD as the startup drive unless you used UEFI on the HDD(unlikely).
     
  14. Polyesta

    Polyesta Member

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    Unless I misunderstood someone said it bugs or glitches in the above comments or in'a tech forum. I would have to completely erase windows from every aspect of the drive... which I guess wouldn't be hard to do, and I guess doing that method would take an enormous amount of time which may not even be needed.
     
  15. Lazybum

    Lazybum :D Staff Member Moderator

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    I mentioned it, like I said it's more a personal thing. I thought you were just cloning the whole drive over, if that's not the case then yeah what viroman said is the easier and better way, mostly because fresh starts help a lot with load times and what not. Cloning the whole thing is nice if you like how you have it set up and don't want to deal with reinstalling a million things.

    I would still probably delete the windows folder in the old drive though, it's not like it's doing anything for you besides eating like 40 gigs or whatever it is.
     
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  16. ViroMan

    ViroMan Black Hole (*sniff*) Bully

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    That is what I did... after the clean install I just removed the traces of previous windows. Install programs... copy data over... gtg.
     
  17. Tama

    Tama Developer Staff Member Web Developer

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    That sounds like a good process. Cloning a 1TB SSD to another identical one took about 10 hours using dd and letting it choose the blocksize itself; i.e. `dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb`. Make SURE you have those the right way around, if means input "file", this is the old windows drive that actually works, of is output "file", which is the blank one.
     
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  18. Thexa4

    Thexa4 Developer Staff Member Moderator

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    You really want to specify a blocksize, otherwise it will choose 512 bytes, which is too small for modern devices. Setting a bs=4m usually speeds copies up significantly. The tip about verifying the input and output is a good one, had to restore from backup once due to a mistake like that.
     
  19. Neoony

    Neoony Member

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    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]
    (BootRacer measurement http://www.greatis.com/bootracer/)

    At around 22 seconds (or as soon as you see your desktop) you can do anything you want, at least with windows 8.1.
    While your other startups are still starting. And I got quite many startups. It has no problem doing both, mostly because of the high random access speed of the SSDs.

    It was few minutes for me before SSD, to get to any acceptable start with all my startups.

    Very happy with this Samsung SSD 850 EVO. Many software features too.

    You should definitely stick with at least windows 8.1 or up. Mostly for better SSD "compatibility"...or in other way, 8.1 handles it much better by default than older windowses.
    I would definitely rather install a fresh windows on it, while backing up and restoring your valuable data.
    ...or you should grab any opportunity to clean install a windows xD

    Forget about waiting for your computer with most basic tasks. Its hell of a improvement with anything regarding accessing the HD. Of course, not much improvement in raw fps in games or so, only loading times and such. Its gonna probably still be the most speed-noticable upgrade to your PC xD

    Totally worth it.
    And totally worth a clean install :D (much better option)

    To compare the speeds to the regular HD I use (which is totally overfilled and badly organized):
    SSD:
    [​IMG]
    Its sometimes faster sometimes slower when I benchmark at different days. The only weird thing is the sequential reads/writes overreaching the "up to" value in Samsung Magician software. Not sure why.

    Regular messy HD:
    [​IMG]

    But just look at the random read/write difference xD
     
    Last edited: Dec 26, 2016
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  20. Lazybum

    Lazybum :D Staff Member Moderator

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    That really helps when your hard drive has like 50% fragmentation. I don't notice any slow downs even with my drives that badly fragmented.

    I know it was a good idea to disable defraging a ssd to help with write endurance, but is that still a good idea? I couldn't really do it anyway with my hard drives being 95% full all the time, but I do wonder.
     

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