I’m considering replacing the 500GB mechanical hard disk in my desktop PC with a 500GB SSD. The goal is to improve the performance of the old girl, which is three or four years old now? I’ll be increasing the RAM from 4GB as well (it’s a 64bit machine).
I already use Macrium Reflect to do disk images for backup purposes. I’ve tested a restore, and it worked seamlessly. But I’ve never used Reflect to clone my system disk from one Drive to another, which is what I guess we’re talking about here - and this would also involve restoring to a disk which uses different technology (SSD).
So… any gotchas? I have Office 2013 installed, which I obtained through my employer’s Home Use Program license. In the back of my head I vaguely remember that the latest version of Office has problems if you change system components.
Macrium Reflect was what I used to clone the hard drive of my laptop to an SSD. Worked perfectly. made a boot/“rescue” disc (actually a USB flash drive,) connected the SSD using a USB-to-SATA adapter, booted from the Macrium rescue drive, and cloned away.
Ditto, I’ve done the same, using Macrium Reflect to an SSD.
One possible gotcha is that many (or maybe most or all) SSDs use the AF (“Advanced Format”) geometry, which means that the restored partition may not necessarily be properly sector-aligned. Mine wasn’t the first time I did the restore, but this was some years ago with an older version of Macrium. From what I vaguely recall (Macrium may have changed since then) I ended up creating the advanced version of a Macrium Windows PE based boot CD which was capable of partition alignment, and did a second restore with that. Not sure that it really hugely made a performance difference, but at least I know that it’s now aligned and not doing unnecessary I/Os. It wouldn’t surprise me that current versions of Macrium ought to do the alignment automatically, but just a note that it was an issue for me at the time.
If you buy a Samsung SSD, you get migration software in the box (it’s an OEM version of something, I can’t remember what. It will handle any brand of spinning disk or SSD to the new SSD either via SATA or a USB to SATA adapter.
No problems with either Windows activation or Office 2013.
I know the OP is talking about a desk top machine, but I thought I’d throw this out there.
I live at a very high elevation 11,200 feet. And I kept having the weirdest problems with my net book. Turns out, the air density was not enough to keep the drives reader head from bouncing off the disk. WAMMO. I was having the strangest things happen. It was like it was possessed. I was sure it was a nasty virus (or the devil in the machine )
My understanding is that commercial disks are rated to about 7000 feet. What a normal airliner is pressurized to. Sort of makes sense.
I bought a disk drive reader that I could connect with USB and swapped out the HD for a SSD and things just purr along. It boots in about 20 seconds, so that is a plus too.
The external HD reader made it way easy to copy stuff onto the new SSD drive.
It can help quite a bit (load time improvements of ~40%+, read/write speeds 2x or more?), unless the machine is so old/slow that the CPU is the main slowdown. Basically, they’re much, much faster than hard drives, but how much of a benefit you’ll see on your own machine depends on its other components. A computer is only as fast as its slowest component, which is often but not always the hard drive.
The CPU in the PC in question is an Intel i5-750. When I got the PC (four years-ish ago, I think), it was a nice chip. Not the fastest now, but still capable.
I’ve ordered a Crucial MX 100 SSD and an extra 8GB of RAM, for a total of 12GB. I’ll report back how it goes, but it might be the weekend before I get a chance to do the upgrade.
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