Moving from 1tb hdd to ssd and mbr/gpt questions

[BadNight]

So I have a 1tb hdd, separated to several partitions in mbr. I'm planning on moving it to a 128gb nvme to free up sata drive space for more storage.

Q1: If I move all the data of the other partitions to another drive, and then delete them and leave them as empty (ie file explorer only sees only a 128gb C drive), how would cloning the drive accept this? Would it just clone the remaining C drive? Or would it still want 1tb?

Q2: Regarding GPT, what would I need to do to accomplish this? Do I format the nvme as mbr first so the os boots, then change it later? Or do I just format to GPT, then clone the mbr drive in and just let win 10 figure it out on it's own?

 

[USAFRet]

1. Please don't get a 128GB drive. You WILL be sorry in a while.

2. An NVMe for your boot drive isn't really much better than a regular SATA drive.

3. During the cloning operation, you can select which partition(s) you want. The recent tools (Macrium Reflect, Casper) don't really care about the actual Source drive size, but rather just the actual used space.

To clone into a 120GB drive, you need the actual used space to be below 75GB.
For a 250GB drive, it needs to be below 200GB.

You don't need to do anything to the new drive before the cloning operation.

 

[BadNight]

I mostly need it to free up space for more sata slots storage. Speed doesn't really matter.
As it currently is, I'm using:
1st slot = 1tb hdd, os + some data partitions
2nd slot = 256gb ssd for frequently used games
3rd slot = 320gb recording hdd. Lots of data written everyday, so I don't want to waste a ssd or 1+tb hdd when it breaks.
4th slot = 1tb data hdd
5th slot = 1tb data hdd
6th slot = 2tb data hdd

The main plan is to put the os in a nvme. Transfer the remaining data on 1st and 4th to a 2tb drive. Get another 2tb to take the place of the 4th drive.

The old 1tb drive will be relegated to backups for the more important data.

 

[USAFRet]

Verify in your user manual which, if any, SATA ports are affected by an NVMe drive.
In my system (ASRck Z97M), use of an NVMe drive in the m.2 port negates the use of SATA 4 & 5.

For your cloning operation, the newer tools like Macrium Reflect only take into consideration the actual data space, not the size of the partition.

So cloning into a 120GB drive...the partition can be 1TB, as long as the consumed space of data is 75GB or so.