Can I move win10 from my SSD to a new M.2 SSD?

[Jaiden Navarrete]

I'm wanting to move my win10 to a 500gb/1tb WD Blue m.2 ssd from my Samsung Evo 850 250gb ssd. Any ideas?

 

[corroded]

Same PC... yes. You might need to re-activate it

 

[Barty1884]

You have two options.
1. Clone the OS directly (moving from a smaller SSD to a larger is pretty easy)
2. Clean install your OS

Most SSDs come with some form of 'cloning' software - of varying quality &/or user-friendliness - and there are numerous freeware options out there too.

Your OS will reactivate without the need for entering a key if you clean install - and it would be the recommended option.

 

[fancarolina]

Since the WD Blue 500GB M.2 SSD is SATA Based you should have no issues cloning it over. If it were nVME based I would have concerns.

 

[Barty1884]

What concerns would those be, out of curiosity @fancarolina?

 

[jsmithepa]

500GB to 250GB..... if you have used less than 250GB, move away (in reality, you should never fill it more than 70% of its full capacity). If you already used more than 250GB, very difficult, best to re-install from scratch, and this time OS+Apps ONLY on the 250, and everything else, i.e.: big video files to secondary.

 

[Barty1884]

I think they're moving 250GB to either 500GB or 1TB @jsmithepa

 

[fancarolina]

What concerns would those be, out of curiosity @fancarolina?

When Windows installs it sets the registry to only initialize the controller based upon what mode is chosen at time of install. This is why if you install in IDE Compatibility mode, AHCI, or RAID mode and change the controller mode after install Windows will BSOD on boot with a 7B Inaccessible Boot Device error. I would suspect that NVMe would behave in a similar fashion.

There are registry edits and software solutions like Paragons P2P Adjust that can make it bootable on different modes/hardware but I don't know if these will work or not. I just haven't tried this with an NVMe drive yet.

 

[Barty1884]

Cloning SATA to NVMe doesn't behave the same way (well, not exactly anyway).
You can successfully clone an AHCI enabled SATA install to an NVMe and boot from it without issue.

That's not to say I would actually recommend doing it though - I'd always advocate for a clean install (be it SATA-SATA, SATA-NVMe or otherwise).