Easiest way to upgrade to SSD in Windows 8.1

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dmerit

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Feb 16, 2013
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I would prefer not to format and lose all my games. Any ideas would be great as my start up time since I upgraded to 8.1 has greatly increased and I have been wanting to go with SSD.
 
I've used a program called Acronis Migrate Easy before and it worked wonders. I didn't have to reinstall anything because it basically performs a bit for bit copy. You'll probably want to defrag the HDD first and then use Acronis. Last time I did this it was with a win 7 system, but it should work fine with Win 8. It's very much worth it in terms of the amount of time saved not having to reinstall everything. Hope this helps.
 
You could clone it over. After your done, go into the Task Scheduler and look under Microsoft\Maintenance\ and right click WinSAT and click run. This will run in the background for approximately 5 minutes. WinSAT properly detecting the SSD will allow Windows 8, within 30 minutes or so, tune itself to work with the SSD (memory and disk optimizations).
 
If I clone the drive to a SSD does it have to be same size drive I got a 2tb HDD that's approximately half full I just want high priority stuff on SSD ie OS and some video editing software. Is there a way to clone just my OS to the SSD...every time I type SSD I thing of dreamcatcher movie SSDD great flick
 
dmerit said:
If I clone the drive to a SSD does it have to be same size drive I got a 2tb HDD that's approximately half full I just want high priority stuff on SSD ie OS and some video editing software. Is there a way to clone just my OS to the SSD...every time I type SSD I thing of dreamcatcher movie SSDD great flick
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Many moderns cloning tools will allow you to clone to different size partitions. Make sure you have removed all the data you can from the HDD, then defrag the hell out of it so that the data is moved to the front of the partition. Better yet, once you think you're ready, use Disk Management utility in Windows 8 and shrink the parition on the hard drive down to the size of the SSD you're moving too. This way you'll know if everything fits.
 
The hard drive does not have to be the same size for it to be cloned, but I would move all the unnecessary files to another drive before cloning the drive to an SSD. The SSD must have the capacity in terms of how much is used on the HDD, but overall capacity does not have to match. Once it's cloned and you are running the OS from the SSD simply copy the files back to the HDD if you wish.
 
Thanks for the input, I will just squeeze all my games and movies onto a 1TB backup drive, and give it a shot.
 
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