Resolved Replace HDD with 2.5" SSD

Wife's HDD is making a bit of a strange noise on boot up when it is turned on. I have been considering installing a SSD. My plan would be to purchase a Samsung 850 EVO but 2.5" is all I find. Will that work in a desktop tower? The current HDD is 3.5".

I have a Manhattan QuickDock Duo that will permit me to put the old HDD and the new SSD in side by side and clone the old drive to the new drive. Does the issue of going from HDD to SSD cause any problems in doing this?

If all the above is workable, I would put the cloned SSD in the computer as the C Drive and put the old HDD back in as a storage place for videos, documents, photos, etc. Would I need to remove the OS from the old HDD and, if so, how should I approach that? We have an external drive that we use for backups and images.

 

2.5" is the standard SSD size. And yes, it will work. Check your case. It may already have a 2.5" mounting location. If not, 2.5 to 3.5 adapter brackets are easy to find.

Some folks just use velcro to attach the SSD to the case.

You do not have to remove the OS from your old hard drive as long as you make sure the old drive is no longer your boot drive. However, if that old HD is making noises now, I personally would not trust it store any documents or photos.

 

Good point. I may just give up the old HDD. I think I am going to go ahead and give it a whirl. Thanks.

 

I would back up anything on that HD you don't want to lose - just in case.

 

One more question. I have a Dell Inspiron laptop that I have been considering for a SSD. Do the 2.5" SSDs work in laptops?

 

Yep! And in a notebook, you don't need the bracket adapter either.

BTW, if you have not experienced SSDs you will be amazed at the all-around gains in performance. I've been running with SSDs for a few years now and boot and wake times in particular still amaze me.

And when it comes to notebooks, SSDs generate less heat (always important with notebooks), they consume less power (nice for battery run times) and they are much lighter than hard drives (always nice when lugging notebooks, even lightwight notebooks around).

 

The machine I am using now has a 256 GB SSD and a 1TB HDD - most of reason I am looking now at updating my other machines. Thanks for the input. I'll mark this one as "Solved".

 

I can vouch for Bill's comments. I have changed my HP Notebook from it's original 2.5 HDD to SSD.
I changed 3 Desktops to SSD's and this comp is running the 500GB EVO, the others including my wife's are on 240GB SSD's.
Much faster in boot and operation.

 

Update
Got it done. I had planned to use the Manhattan QuickDock to clone the old drives to the new SSDs - easy, right? Had a hitch - the target drive capacity must be greater than the origin drive. So I had to change my approach as follows:

Laptop - Used Macrium Reflect Free clone feature. Put the new SSD in the QuickDock to use as a USB drive and then opened up Macrium and set it to clone the laptop HDD to the SSD in the QuickDock. Took about 2 hours but worked perfectly.

Desktop - Tried to use the Macrium clone process as described above but it failed twice. I then created a new Macrium image and a new rescue media disk. Removed the old HDD from the computer, replaced it with the new, empty, SSD and booted from the rescue media in the disk drive. Macrium rescue opened up with the restore option using the newly created image which took an hour or so to run. After completion, the computer booted up in less than a minute where it had been taking 3 - 4 minutes to boot.

So thanks for all the input and I thought I would share this as I learned a lot during the process.

 

Sweet. And well done!

I bet you did. For sure, thanks for sharing and the followup post.