Clone Vs Reinstall Windows 10 on SSD?

[realmatrix]

I plan to upgrade to a SSD. I don't want to go through the trouble of downloading updates,drivers for a windows 10 clean install hence I am inclined to taking the cloning option , however if I clone the HDD OS partition on to the SSD, is it so that the SSD won't perform optimally since windows will treat it as a HDD after I boot into it.
Will windows 10 automatically disable prefetch ,indexing options, enable TRIM once the drive is cloned. or its better to go for clean install?

 

[basroil]

NEVER clone a HDD to put on an SSD, it will not only decrease performance but also cause faster drive wear. Just clean install, it won't take too long to set up, and it'll clean out gunk accumulated from old software too.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Cloning HDD to SSD is common practice.
But those prefetch/indexing options you will need to setup manually or with some software.
I know Intel SSD toolbox software does that with one push of a button.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Windows will not "treat" it as a HDD. Windows checks for hardware changes constantly, and during every startup sequence. I've never had a problem with moving a disk image from a hard drive to an SSD. And I've done so maybe three or four hundred times. Certainly there are Windows settings that can be changed to optimize the SSD performance, but a cloned image or a system image backup meant for fully restoring the system, such as what is used by Acronis true image, generally work perfectly fine.

I've never had an issue doing this. The only time we see problems is going from HDD to SSD with a disk image or clone, when other hardware like the motherboard and CPU platform have changed as well. I'd make sure you have the latest bios installed for your motherboard though, especially if it's a somewhat older platform as even motherboards new enough to support SSD use may not have new enough bios support for some of the newer SSD controllers.

 

[realmatrix]

I intend to use my Windows 10 System Restore Image which I had created recently after the 2.5 gb windows 10 update download

 

[Darkbreeze]

No. You do not want to do that. You WILL have issues, I guarantee it. You are much better off using one of the free cloning utilities available which you can find by doing a quick google search, or even better would be getting a full on disk imaging utility like Acronis true image. There are a few free variants of that as well, but I know for certain they don't work AS well as the paid versions.

Windows restore sucks, and is unreliable. You are likely to end up needing to do a clean install if you go that route. Make sure that no matter which way you go, you back up all your important files and folders first so that if for any reason the image or method you use fails to work correctly, you do not lose your irreplaceable data and documents.