tldr:
https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-upgrade-ssd-windows-10/
The way I did it with my nephew:
We purchased a 500GB SSD. (Samsung 850 evo).
We purchased a copy of Acronis backup.
He had a 1tb hard drive with about 560gb of stuff on it.
We deleted some old games, uninstalled some programs and we were down to a little more than 400gb of files on the hard drive.
I had previously purchased an external case for the SSD that connected with USB.
I don't remember if when we plugged in the USB case with the SSD in it if we had to go to disk management and create a New Simple Volume. I've done that a lot, so it would have been something I did without thinking about it. The point is that you have to have the new SSD show up with a drive letter (like Drive F
.
We installed Acronis and cloned the hard drive to the SSD in the USB external case.
We opened the computer case, unplugged the hard drive, plugged in the SSD.
I had an extra SATA cable, and a Y-connector that split the sata power and allowed me to power two drives. A lot of computer power supplies have an extra sata power connector, but you usually need a spare sata cable to add a drive.
I booted the computer with JUST the SSD plugged in. The hard drive was unplugged at this point.
WOW that was fast.
I forced a windows update, rebooted.
I forced another windows update, rebooted.
In this case there was a place to mount the 2 1/2 SSD, so I didn't have to use an adapter plate to fit the 2 1/2 inch drive in a 3 1/2 inch slot. Basically you have to put the new SSD somewhere in the case. Our case had a spot for it. Most desktop cases have room for another hard drive. Worst case in my own computers I've just let the SSD dangle from the wires. It's light, and I don't move my case once it is working, but I would recommend mounting the drive somewhere.
Once the new SSD was installed,
Wow that's fast.
We connected the hard drive using the sata cable I had, and the Y-connector for power.
I rebooted. I expected it to try to reboot from the hard drive, at this point the computer could have booted from the SSD or the Hard drive because both of them had a complete windows installation. Fortunately it booted from the SSD, and the Hard Drive showed up as drive F:
If it HAD booted from the hard drive I would have unplugged and swapped the sata cables. The idea would have been to have the BIOS find the SSD first, and try to boot from it. I prefer to make the hardware 'just work', but I suppose I could have gone into BIOS and told it which device to boot from in the boot order section.
After everything had worked for a couple of weeks, I called my nephew and had him delete the windows directory on the Hard Drive. That made even more space free.
He has the option of moving some steam games to the hard drive:
http://www.tomsguide.com/answers/id-1974084/moving-steam-games-ssd.html
But I think that he is mostly just running what he currently is playing and having everything on the SSD, and using the 1tb hard drive to back up and store non-game stuff.
He had been playing Ark Survival Evolved with more mods than I could count. His boot time into the game was ten to eleven minutes off of the hard drive.
He now gets into Ark Survival Evolved in less than two minutes.
SSD's are worth the hassle!
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