Best SSD install

[Talus]

Hey everybody and Merry Christmas!  My wonderful Wife got me a 500 GB SSD and now I want to install it.  What's the best way to do it?  Should I clone my HD and put everything on the SSD (this PC is just for gaming, so there is little besides the IL2 games on it) or just install the game on it?  What is the easiest way for someone who used to be enthusiastic about working on PC's, but now just finds it a chore (and doesn't keep up with  it anymore) to do it?  Thanks in advance to everyone and have a great Christmas!

 

Rich

[Chief_Mouser]

I bought a new SSD a couple of months ago and simply copied and pasted my Il-2 install on to it, checked it worked, altered the desktop shortcuts then deleted the original. MS FS2020 I installed onto the SSD directly though; not sure if that would copy and paste as Microsoft installs love having their tentacles in lots of odd places.

[Talus]

Thanks!

 

[dburne]

Yeah unless you need more space for your C drive I would just add it as an additional drive for games.

[WallysWorld]

A few weeks ago, I replaced a smaller SSD with a 2 TB one and I used the excellent and FREE AOMEI Backupper program to make a backup of the original SSD onto an external backup drive and then just copied everything to the new drive from the external without reinstalling anything. I've done that twice so far with new SSD's and had no issues. But this does not involve Windows' drive being replaced, just extra SSD's for games and files.

 

I assume that some people are taking regular backups of their drives just in case? It saved me four years ago when my old HDD drive died and I lost everything, but I had backed everything up using Backupper onto an external drive and at least saved quite a lot of files including some important stuff.

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

5 hours ago, Talus said:

Should I clone my HD and put everything on the SSD (this PC is just for gaming, so there is little besides the IL2 games on it) or just install the game on it?

 

If your operating system is installed on a hard disk drive (old spinning technology), I'd strongly recommend reinstalling everything on the new SSD. If you just use the SSD as additional storage for games, your overall system responsiveness won't benefit from the faster SSD.

 

44 minutes ago, WallysWorld said:

I assume that some people are taking regular backups of their drives just in case? It saved me four years ago when my old HDD drive died and I lost everything, but I had backed everything up using Backupper onto an external drive and at least saved quite a lot of files including some important stuff.

 

This can depend on the contents of the drive. If it's a pure gaming computer, full backups might be unnecessary - just re-download all the games in a worst-case scenario. Of course, any irreplaceable files should have multiple independent backups.

[SCG_OpticFlow]

Upgraded from my previous SSD to a new one 3 days ago. I simply cloned the old drive into the new one with the Samsung (the make of the new SSD) Data Migration Software and after that removed the old one and turned on the PC and it worked as before but with larger and faster drive. No idea if this software would work with other makes but they might have something similar...