Question Migrating Programs/Data from HDD to SSD

[c3walk3r]

I have 2 hard drives in my system. My primary (OS) is on a 256GB SSD, and my secondary hard drive (non-OS)(500GB HDD), that contains data and installed programs (including games). Since the prices have gone down, I decided to replaced my HDD with a SSD (1TB).

Would it be better to clone or copy/paste everything to the SSD? Then switch out the drives? Would the system automatically assign the SSD the same letter as the original HDD? Or would I need to reassign drive letters prior to switching them out?

Also since there are alot of programs installed (on my E-drive), would just switching out the hard drives (after migrating all the data/programs AND changing the drive letter to "E") cause the programs to still open/operate properly?

 

[mdd1963]

Applications that are installed to the D and or E drive cannot be simply copied/pasted to C: to migrate them after an SSD swap.

As you already have a mixed drive system (OS on one drive, applications on two others) the cleanest way would be to do a full reinstall to your new, larger SSD once installed, installing everything you want on it directly to it.... (Bound to be quicker than uninstalling from D, and reinstalling to C, etc..)

 

[popatim]

Most games that use a 'launcher' app, such as Steam or Origin, can just be copied back into their new library location or the currently location as as a new library in the launcher app once you reinstall that.

Anything that installs by itself, like Office, needs to be reinstalled.

 

[USAFRet]

I have 2 hard drives in my system. My primary (OS) is on a 256GB SSD, and my secondary hard drive (non-OS)(500GB HDD), that contains data and installed programs (including games). Since the prices have gone down, I decided to replaced my HDD with a SSD (1TB).

Would it be better to clone or copy/paste everything to the SSD? Then switch out the drives? Would the system automatically assign the SSD the same letter as the original HDD? Or would I need to reassign drive letters prior to switching them out?

Also since there are alot of programs installed (on my E-drive), would just switching out the hard drives (after migrating all the data/programs AND changing the drive letter to "E") cause the programs to still open/operate properly?

With a secondary drive (the E drive?), no cloning/migration is needed or desired.

Copy/paste (not Move) everything from the old drive to the new SSD.
Then, swap around the drive letters so that the new drive has the same drive letter as the old one did. You have to do this manually.

The OS will not know the difference, except for the improved speed.