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Clone laptop mechanical drive to SSD - asking a stupid question (probably)

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I have a decent HP laptop; 17z, AMD 9720P quad processor, plenty of RAM, etc. Latest Win 10, 1903 fully patched and updated blah, blah, blah. And am running the latest Acronis 2020, etc.
The 'choke point' is its 5400 rpm 1T drive. I have transitioned to SSDs in my other computers but I am keen to do the same with this laptop, which brings me to the stupid question.
It appears that you need a source (laptop drive) and destination (the SSD) connected. I use a 2.5" 500G mechanical drive in a USB 3.0 case for backups. I'm guessing that I can attach the SSD in a similar way and proceed with the cloning. (manual or automatic?)
Once the operation is complete, replace the laptop drive with the SSD.
How far off am I?
Thanks.

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You need to make sure that the SSD will fit in the Dell; while the length and width is (if I recall correctly) standard, the height can vary. So, find the model number of the HDD in the Dell which should then allow you to find out the dimensions.

There are two possibilities on how to "clone" the drive; one is to use a USB Docking station (they invariably take both 3.5" and 2.5" drives) or a USB 3 to SATA connector (you can find them on Amazon or eBay).

You will need to create recovery media on USB stick to do the cloning - we do not recommend doing so from Windows - besides which you cannot clone windows to USB drive. So you will need to use recovery media. First create a back of the existing HDD. I prefer to do a recovery to the new drive rather than do a clone (fewer things can go wrong) but I have successfully cloned from HDD to SSD several times.

Once the clone is completed, remove the HDD and install the SSD. This can be easy or difficult depending on the particular notebook. Dell have manuals that explain how to do this for each model (I think they are called service manuals) - check it out before doing anything else. I did that with my Dell and the process was rather difficult since it is extremely thin and you have to take the back off to get access. So I decided against doing the upgrade. For other models it is extremely easy to do the upgrade.

Ian

Well, lost my reply to you.
Thank you for taking the time to address my issue.

DD

DD, I would strongly recommend following the guidance given in KB 2931: How to clone a laptop hard drive - and install the new SSD in place of your current 500GB HDD in the laptop, then perform the clone using the Acronis bootable rescue media (using the same BIOS boot mode as your Windows OS uses).

It is recommended to put the new drive in the laptop first, and connect the old drive via USB. Otherwise you will may not be able to boot from the new cloned drive, at Acronis True Image will apply a bootability fix to the new disk and adjust the boot settings of the target drive to boot from USB. If the new disk is inside the laptop, the boot settings will be automatically adjusted to boot from internal disk. As such, hard disk bays cannot be used for target disks. For example, if you have a target hard disk (i.e. the new disk to which you clone, and from which you intend to boot the machine) in a bay, and not physically inside the laptop, the target hard disk will be unbootable after the cloning.

See KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media and KB 63226: Acronis True Image 2020: how to create bootable media