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Is it advisable to replace an HDD with SSD on an old(11 years old) Desktop

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My 11 year old hard drive is working but is slow at times and I don't want to press my luck and have it go bad. So I want to replace my existing 2T hard drive with a 500 gig Solid state drive.  There are threads on how to do this with Acronis, but are there hidden pitfalls to replacing an HD with an SSD on an old  Desktop running Windows 10 Home? If not would there be any special considerations using Acronis 2019 to make the swap?

The HDD is a Samsung HD 204UI ATA was factory partitioned into 3 NTFS partitions. The largest is 1860 gig. The 2019 ATI shows a size of about 275 gig.  BIOS mode is Legacy.  And I don't plan to use the existing HD when the replacement is completed

Thanks 

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welcome to these public User Forums.

If you are replacing like for like, i.e. a SATA HDD with a SATA SSD, then there should be no real downsides to doing this upgrade and the SSD will give you a performance boost.

The first check point to to ensure that the data from your HDD will fit on the size of SSD you are choosing to use.  You need to try to have a minimum of 20% free space on the SSD otherwise it won't give you the performance improvement.

The approach for doing this replacement that I would recommend is as follows:

  1. Create the ATI 2019 rescue media and check that you can boot your PC from it.
     
  2. Make a full Disk backup of the working HDD to an external backup drive.
     
  3. Perform a full Shutdown of Windows by holding a Shift key while clicking on shutdown.  This is to avoid entering a hybrid sleep state used by Windows Fast start.
     
  4. Remove the working HDD and set it aside for safety.  Install the new SSD in its place.
     
  5. Boot from the Acronis rescue media with the external backup drive connected.
     
  6. Recover your full Disk backup to the new SSD using the rescue application.
     
  7. When the recovery is complete, check the Log to double-check all is successful.  You can right-click on the top log entry to save it if needed for reference.
     
  8. If all is good, then exit the offline application, disconnect the external drive and test rebooting into Windows from the new SSD.

See KB 61632: Acronis True Image 2019: how to create bootable media
Also KB 61621: Acronis True Image 2019: How to restore your computer with WinPE-based or WinRE-based media

KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

When doing the restore of your backup, this needs to be done as a Disk & Partition restore and at the top Disk selection level.

Please see forum topic: [How to] recover an entire disk backup - and in particular the attached PDF document which shows a step-by-step tutorial for doing this type of recovery / restore.

Steve 

I really appreciate you expertise and taking the time detailing the steps to take.

Two concerns left.

1. The SSD I am planning to buy is Samsung 860 EVO 500GB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-76E500B/AM)

The HDD is SATA - is SATA III on the SSD a showstopper.

2.  My ATI  backup is 275 gig - which would leave 45% free space. But the HDD was 1.8T. Will the process see the backup as 275 or 1.8T.

Thanks

Mark 

P.S. You deserve a massive round of applause for all the help you have provided others on this forum.

 

SATA devices are backwards compatible, so even if the SATA controller is SATA I the Samsung drive will work. I have SATA III SSD on a SATA 2 controller and it works well. With less than SATA 3 controller, you will not get the same performance increases; however you will avoid those due to disk fragmentation (SSDs do not have a fragmentation problem). Another possibility is to get an add-in PCIe card that will allow you to boot from a SATA drive attached to the add-in card. Many add-in cards are no bootable; The BIOS may indicate if it support booting from add-in cards; check out the motherboard manual as well.

Ian

2.  My ATI  backup is 275 gig - which would leave 45% free space. But the HDD was 1.8T. Will the process see the backup as 275 or 1.8T.

Mark, there is an extra step that I would recommend doing here with regards to the above.

Download a copy of the free MiniTool Partition Wizard software and install this on your HDD, then use this tool to resize your HDD to a size that will fit comfortably on the new 500GB SSD.

The process is fairly intuitive but as always have a good full Disk backup made before starting.

I had to do something similar recently for a friend with a failing 1TB laptop HDD where I was replacing it with a 240 GB SSD drive where ATI would not even offer the SSD as a choice for the target for recovery because it couldn't see a way to fit the data (due to disk errors).

What I did was resize the main C: OS partition down to around 190GB leaving the freed space as unallocated on the drive and the other partitions as they were.  I then made a new Disk backup and was able to recover that to the smaller SSD with no issues.

With the partition wizard, click on the partition to select it, then select Move/Resize from the right-click menu.  Use the 'grab-handles' to drag the right side of the partition to the left to create free space after the end of the partition.  Once done, click on the Apply button to complete the process and let the program restart the computer to do the actual resize.

Steve

Thanks for your continued help. I really appreciated the added suggestions as it is would be quite challenging  "to get there and find that there is no there there". The partitioning would be a good insurance policy against that. 

 I will be sure to do a ATI backup (2019) before, I partition my HDD using the tool you suggested.  As a "back-out plan", I want to avoid the worse case which would be to end up with an unusable system because my HDD configuration is not recognized because of my re-partitioning.

So if the something happens, and I restore the HDD using the ATI I just created before hand, will the fact that I partitioned the HDD using the tool, cause problems with the ATI restore?  If not, will the new partitioning remain after the restore? Or will the HDD (I hope) be restored to the partitions at the time of the backup? Here is why I am concerned:

The computer management under disk management shows my HDD has the following partitions in the order given.  

Healthy(Recovery Partition) 100MB; Healthy (Primary (includes boot)) 1861GB; Heathly(System) 515MB; Unallocated 450MB

a. It would seem the new partitioning using the tool would result in:  

  Healthy(Recovery Partition) 100MB; Healthy (Primary (includes boot)) 475GB(or should I make it another size); Unallocated 1,386GB  Heathly(System) 515MB; Unallocated 450MB

b. Since what I want to resize seems to be positioned in the middle of two system type partitions that I don't want to disturb, could the partitioning negatively affect the two smaller system partitions?

Thanks

Mark 

 

 

So if the something happens, and I restore the HDD using the ATI I just created before hand, will the fact that I partitioned the HDD using the tool, cause problems with the ATI restore?  If not, will the new partitioning remain after the restore? Or will the HDD (I hope) be restored to the partitions at the time of the backup? Here is why I am concerned:

Mark, the first action of any Disk recovery is to wipe the target drive so as to establish the partition layout / configuration from the backup image being recovered.  This means that you will go back to the partition layout & sizes as captured in the backup image from before the changes.

a. It would seem the new partitioning using the tool would result in:  

  Healthy(Recovery Partition) 100MB; Healthy (Primary (includes boot)) 475GB(or should I make it another size); Unallocated 1,386GB  Heathly(System) 515MB; Unallocated 450MB

b. Since what I want to resize seems to be positioned in the middle of two system type partitions that I don't want to disturb, could the partitioning negatively affect the two smaller system partitions?

I would suggest resizing the 1861GB main partition down to 450GB which will allow ATI to adjust the size during the recovery along with positioning the other partitions as needed on the new SSD.  ATI will handle the other system partitions according to the rules governing their placement.

If there is any larger 'chunks' of unallocated space after the recovery has completed, then you can use the partition tool again to expand the main OS partition into that unallocated space, assuming that it is adjacent to the unallocated space.  I would not worry about that at this time and deal with it if it becomes a question after everything else is back to working as expected.

Further to my comment about a PCIe add-in card; the performance improvement depends on the version of PCIe that the particular slot supports. PCIe 2 will have enough bandwidth to give good performance - I have a PCIe add-in card with an M.2 NVMe SSD that gets speeds about 4 times that of a SATA drive. As far as I know it is not bootable.

Ian