I have a family member who complains that her laptop is slow. I checked the laptop over and indeed, it was slow, so I looked into what was using the most hardware, and found that the hard drive was at 100% pretty much the whole time.
I disabled as many services and programs at startup as I could (without disabling the Trend Micro Internet Security suite), but the HDD was still at 100%.
So I advised her to purchase an SSD (a Samsung 128GB, just released).
She received the drive in the post today, and she wants me to 'do my magic'.
The storage space taken up is 79GB, which is fine as she doesn't use the SSD for massive files/folders (only to browse the 'net, read emails, type up Word docs, etc). The source drive has a 260GB capacity, with an extra 60GB for the laptop's recovery partition (I don't plan to transfer this partition across).
The backup/restore utility is the standard Windows 7 backup/restore utility, though I may consider using Acronis..
I have two questions that I would like to know before I commence:
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Can a system image from a larger drive be restored to a smaller one, especially since the source drive is a HDD and the target is an SSD?
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Is a HDD to SSD transfer possible?
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Would it just be wiser to install Windows onto the SSD, and then transfer the programs, documents, and settings of the old HDD?
I've seen this question about restoring a Windows system image to a smaller drive, but it doesn't really answer my questions.
Best Answer
First a remark: Even with a slow disk, it is not normal for the disk to always be at 100%. If the cause is system corruption or virus infection, then by reimaging this system you might only transfer the problem as-is to the SSD. I would therefore counsel to start with full system scans by several anti-virus products including at least Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, to do sfc /scannow and to examine the Event Viewer for error messages. If problems are found, better install Windows to the SSD from scratch rather than take the chance of doing all this for nothing.
Good and free imaging products exist that can do this migration, so you don't need a commercial product like Acronis. I would prefer using a third-party product rather than Windows Backup, because the later has too many gotchas and not enough support.
Before imaging the disk, I would first prepare the system disk to reduce its size :
The free products I recommend for the transfer are :
Do the backup using the smart or sector-by-sector method, so only used sectors are backup. This reduces the times of both backup and restore and makes likelier the successful transfer to a different-sized disk.
Study carefully the documentation of the backup/restore product that you choose. The documentation of both products should have advice regarding the migration to SSD.
Both products can create recovery boot media on CD. Create it on the target computer, and test carefully before proceeding. Verify that the restore boot can see the device on which the disk-image is stored.
These products can also partition the SSD disk, which is preferable to your doing it manually.
If you have another computer that can accept the SSD as a second hard-disk, you could do the restore on that computer, then move the disk to the target computer. In that case you wouldn't need the boot media.