Upgrade from HDD to SSD

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I bought a Samsung EVO 860 500gb SSD to upgrade the hard drive on my 1.5 year old Lenovo laptop. This will be my first time doing something like this so any info you guys can share would be much appreciated.

I was originally going to clone my current hard drive to the new SSD but a few people told me to do a fresh windows 10 install. Will the fresh install really make the much difference? My laptop was barely used and it was used lightly for some photos, emailing and word documents, no games or major downloads.

whether I clone or do a fresh install what would be the correct procedure?
 
I went fresh install when I upgraded. You put Win10 on a USB drive and you're ready to go.
 
I went with a fresh install on an older laptop and WOW blazing speed! When the SSD's came out I was skeptical but I'm a believer now (but I still backup to a regular HDD everything I want to keep). You will be pleased with the result.
 
Really, it depends on how savvy you are and how much time you want to spend on it. Personally, I would never clone a spinning drive to an SSD simply because swapping parts, installing Windows, updating drivers and restoring data is easy, even enjoyable for me.

If you do a fresh install, Windows 10 is pretty good about installing workable recent drivers for most hardware, so more than likely it'll work fine after Windows finishes installing and it does the first round of updates. No real need to track down the latest and greatest from every hardware manufacturer.
 
Whatever route you choose to follow, make sure you have a Microsoft account linked to this particular machine BEFORE you start - especially if you dont have a key and only a typical modern digital license. Once done, re-activation is totally automatic
 
I understand the need to do a fresh install on an older laptop but on a laptop like when where it was hardly used, no games or downloads does it really make much difference? I guess it would delete unnecessary junk that was installed by Lenovo?
 
Originally Posted by LvR
Whatever route you choose to follow, make sure you have a Microsoft account linked to this particular machine BEFORE you start - especially if you dont have a key and only a typical modern digital license. Once done, re-activation is totally automatic


How can I confirm this?
 
Personally I'd just clone it. Yes if you do a fresh install the performance will be better, but if you clone correctly you should still be fast enough and durable enough. The amount of work to reinstall is probably not worth the gain.
 
Originally Posted by diyjake
Originally Posted by LvR
Whatever route you choose to follow, make sure you have a Microsoft account linked to this particular machine BEFORE you start - especially if you dont have a key and only a typical modern digital license. Once done, re-activation is totally automatic


How can I confirm this?

Don't worry about that, you have a laptop so the license key should be a sticker on it already. If you have a home build machine and you don't have the original key then it may be a problem, but not in your situation.
 
I would clone it.

fresh install will keep you going for hours.. need to find all the lenovo drivers.

you will lose the lenovo restore partition etc.
 
Originally Posted by diyjake
What is a good cloning program? I'll have to check maybe the Samsung SSD hard drive came with one.

Samsung SSD comes with data migration software, or you can download it from their website. That's what I used when I moved from HDD to SSD on my laptop. You will need a USB to SATA cable to accomplish this.
 
Originally Posted by diyjake
Is there a program that I can use to watch the health of a hard drive?

Yes, Samsung Magician, also available for download from their website.
 
Just CLONE it and don't fret. Be sure to use the correct Samsung software to clone, NOT Magician. The software gets rid of a bunch of Windows10 junk on its own, so the cloned image will be smaller than the original space required.
Did this to two old machines. You'll be surprised by the increase in speed and performance!

Magician is used later, after the install.

I bought a hard case, external HD adapter and used that to clone. That way my original HD is protected and usable for backup or external storage. Nothing lost.
 
Having done both cloning and fresh install, I prefer cloning. There wasn't any perceptible difference that I could tell between both options in terms of speed.
 
Log into the account associated with this machine .............. have a look at devices - you should see details of this particular machine there.

I would also clone the thing - shouldn't take you more than 30 minutes if the machine has not been used much yet.

Fresh install may sound nice but chances are you gonna get stuck with drivers and will have to start moving memory sticks around from a currently working machine to get going
 
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