What's the Best Way To Move To A New HDD

[ignoramus]

As above. Also, the biggest decider (for me) which way I would go is whether I can keep my OS license or not.
If not, then sure put in an SSD and install as fresh Win10/64. After that, then attach the old harddisk, to get any personal data off.

If you are just swapping drives over and not much else, there are many progs which can image drives. Many are free or trial.
Also, don't defrag an SSD. In fact turn off the service completely in "services". (right click My computer > manage>services)

[ReptilianPeon]

I would recommend getting an SSD, I replaced my spinning rust drive last year and the difference in boot up time is amazing. From off to the login screen is about 8 seconds (windoze 10 pro) or about 6 seconds (linux mint)

I have given this some thought. Aren't Sold State Drives generally smaller than HDDs (because the technology is smaller)? I think I may go with popeyespappy's suggestion and install Windows again. If I'm going to be paying money for software to clone my existing HDD than maybe I should just install Windows again and then only copy the files I need.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Clean installation is a good start.

[popeyespappy]

I have given this some thought. Aren't Sold State Drives generally smaller than HDDs (because the technology is smaller)? I think I may go with popeyespappy's suggestion and install Windows again. If I'm going to be paying money for software to clone my existing HDD than maybe I should just install Windows again and then only copy the files I need.

2.5" SSD's are the same size as most laptop drives. Many newer cases have slots for 2.5" drives. Adaptors are cheap for those that don't.

1 TB SSD's can be found for less than $150 with little effort. No reason not to get one at that price. Or you could get a 256 GB SSD for your OS and programs and a 4 TB HDD for the rest of your files for $150.

[Angrboda]

Yes. SSDs have dropped in price significantly in the past year. It's a good time to buy.

[ignoramus]

For the pc gamers/overclockers, even sata SSD's are becoming obsolete, hence the price drop.

NVME (non volatile memory) memory sticks communicate directly with the cpu bus and are roughly 4-5 times faster than the 6Gig/s sata bottleneck...
(Never thought in a million years I'd call the 6Gig/s sata standard a bottleneck!) Murphy's law is relentless...

[popeyespappy]

For the pc gamers/overclockers, even sata SSD's are becoming obsolete, hence the price drop.

NVME (non volatile memory) memory sticks communicate directly with the cpu bus and are roughly 4-5 times faster than the 6Gig/s sata bottleneck...
(Never thought in a million years I'd call the 6Gig/s sata standard a bottleneck!) Murphy's law is relentless...

That's fucking cool. I haven't been in the PC market for a while so I didn't know about these, but I'm about to buy a machine for processing audio, video and shit tons (hundreds of thousands) of images. I'm going to have to look into this. I don't have a really big budget, $2000ish, but I don't need high-end graphics either so I may be able to squeeze NVMe in. I'm still going to end up with a bottleneck somewhere because the terabytes of data I'll be working with is going to mean there are standard HDD's in the process somewhere, but the files will be arriving in batches. If I could batch process 100 GB of data at a time on an NVMe drive it would probably speed things up considerably. Maybe not though because moving stuff from the HDD to the NVMe and back would add a step to the process. I still wouldn't mind building an insanely fast workstation for this project though...

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I'm safe from stratospheric computing, I'll just potter along with my year old dinosaur.

[Angrboda]

I'm safe from stratospheric computing, I'll just potter along with my year old dinosaur.

I hear that! When I hung out on #windows on IRC, I was known as the most behind the curve person hands down.

I bought my current computer 5 years ago, but didn't put it together until a year later. I'm still puttering along fine and don't anticipate replacing it for some time to come.

[bennyboy]

One more thing:

About NVMe: it's basically an onboard SSD. A mATX motherboard with an M.2 socket (the standard required for NVMe) and really good stats can be bought for about $100. An entire new comp can be put together for about $500, GFX card not included and assuming you buy fresh RAM and CPU for it (you may not have to).

I have a Samsung 960 EVO M.2 2280, which reads at 3,200M (legit 10x faster than almost anything else) and the 250GB version cost about $100. It installed Windows from my thumb drive in about 5 minutes (not exaggerating even), and from power-off to login takes about 10 seconds. Opening big programs? Photoshop? Office? Almost instant! I didn't realize how much of my life I was waiting for stuff to open until I didn't have to wait anymore.

Note also that this drive is rated for something like 1.5 million hours (if I'm reading Korean correctly)-- not like early SSDs which were much more susceptible to wearing out.