- You correctly ascertain that you’ll need to purchase a mounting bracket separately, but it arrives without the screws needed for affixing the SDD to it…
- …digging through random old installation stuff that you didn’t have the heart to throw away, you do NOT happen to find the screws you need, but you DO find some over-long screws of the right diameter in a home-maker’s convenience assortment kind of Lazy Susan-type thing, left over from a roommate’s late relative’s estate, that you can add some nuts and washer-like dealie-bobs to…
- The interior of your PC case isn’t quite like anything you ran into on-line… there used to be a bunch more HDDs in there, and all of the connections on the Motherboard were hogged by the set-up, but there is a free L-shaped SATA connector and free power cable hanging free, connected in series to the remaining HDD, so you can try those – only slightly, not seriously, worried that you’re going to destroy your whole data reality…
- So you boot back up and verify your computer hasn’t been destroyed, the highly rated Samsung data migration software does recognize you new SDD, and everything seems ready to go on the cloning step, but you see a warning about how HDD content will be deleted during the cloning process.
- Since you have backed up irreplaceable data, you decide you deal with the risk of destroying premium software, and you click go ahead… It tells you the whole process might take 5 hours, but, as it proceeds, the transfer speedometer inches up from ca. 30MB/s to ca. 80MB/s. The time remaining estimate fluctuates, and never gets below 1:45:00 even up to the very last when you reach 90%+, then suddenly it’s complete.
- You click finish or complete or something and are instructed to “install” the new SDD. You think maybe they’re referring to BIOS settings ,or maybe they think you’re handling this differently than you in fact are (like cloning via external connection first?), but you figure what the heck let’s just re-boot and see what happens.
- What happens is that on the first re-boot you can’t tell for sure which disk is which, and you have new drives assigned to J: and K: and other weird stuff…
- What’s additionally weird is that you when re-boot a second time, you have different extra drives, E: and D:, but not J: and K:
- You go into your Motherboard BIOS on the next re-boot, have trouble dealing with the weird interface, happen to mess up the system time, then get to the Boot order screen and are eventually able to assign the SDD drive as boot drive.
- When you finally do manage to get the system booting up from/to the SDD drive space, things really are remarkably faster, though you’re still a little confused by what your File Explorer shows. In addition to two drives with identical content that apparently have everything in them, there’s a “Reserved Space” you don’t understand, an apparently empty drive, and
- However, the SDD drive is now the C: drive, and the HDD is now E:, that much you can tell, and things really are remarkably faster, and you see that some problems with some apps (like Slack for desktop) are now fixed.
- You messed up the system time when screwing around with BIOS, and you try to re-set it. It remains a few minutes off, but you discover that you can fix things by going to Windows 10 settings and turning automatic date-time off and on.
The HDD drive with all of the content, and apparently bootable, is still there – not deleted like the software said it would be. Eventually, you think, you’ll probably re-format the drive and use it for storage or new backup, but you have an old external system for that, and it still has space, so you think you’ll keep it around as as a JIC alternative if your SSD drive fails, although you keep on hearing that Samsungs are incredibly reliable.
So, look, you’re done for now. Things are really hugely improved.
Except… #13: Audio is destroyed! How will you communicate with people? …Turns out you jostled an audio connection when dealing with the desktop case…
And by the way things really are remarkably faster. Maybe there were additional issues with the old HDD you’re replacing, but the system as a whole boots up in about a minute instead of minutes, and programs – email client, MS Office stuff, old Adobe Photoshop for desktop, even Chrome and Firefox – all initiate near-instantly instead of after forever.
Def worth doing.