Rearranging and changing hard drives...

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Jawnskeel

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So two years back, when I built the rig in my sig, I never really used up much hard drive space, so 250 gigs was more than enough at the time. I also skimped out on the specs on it, because I felt I didn't really need it to be fast and it wouldn't slow down my system. Well times have changed, and I want an SSD for the OS and a 2TB for storage.

A few questions I have are how would I "copy" the OS to the SSD? I have 5 GB left on the 250GB drive, is this a problem? I could do a fresh install of the OS, don't have any software I can't get again.

I guess that's the only question I have, lol. But yes please, if you could help me out, I'd greatly appreciate it.
 
It is possible to clone your OS to the new drive, yes, though you'd need to get the size of the OS's partition down to less than the capacity of the SSD before you'd be able to clone it.

The simplest route would just be a fresh install, since you said that won't be much of a problem for you. Also, I'm no expert on SSDs but I'm fairly sure that there are issues when cloning from HDD to SSD, due to the fundamental differences between them.

What OS are you using? Windows 7 is perfect with SSDs as it supports TRIM.
 
I'm using Windows 7. And I guess cloning seems the way to go.

I've never done a fresh install of 7 using the same CD key. Any instructions on how to do that?
 
Because the rest of the hardware is the same, you will have no issue using the same activation key.

You might not get the full performance boost from the SSD, if you clone to it from a HDD than if you do a clean install.
 
What if I don't remember the key I used? Got the copies from my MSDNAA account. I guess I can look it up there. I do want a fresh install too, have installed too much random stuff and it's probably slowing stuff down.


Now can I install my computer games on the second drive or can they only run from the OS drive? I'm thinking <150gigs is all i'm going to need for the OS drive.
 
Now can I install my computer games on the second drive or can they only run from the OS drive? I'm thinking <150gigs is all i'm going to need for the OS drive.
You can install them to your secondary drive (usually termed 'storage' drive). The vast majority of games and programs can be installed completely to a secondary drive (excluding things like registry entries etc.). There are some major ones, such as Microsoft Office and Adobe suite programs that have to install at last some on the main drive, though. I can confirm that Steam and any Steam games don't need anything to be on the main drive, if you use it.

I use a 40GB partition for my OS, and never have any problems. I rarely go above 30GB usage on that, with everything put on the storage drive (and you get some people that complain that a 60GB SSD isn't enough for them! :p)
 
So upgrading to a 60GB SSD and a 7200RPM 2TB HD in the coming weeks sounds good.


Also, when I do reinstall the OS, wouldn't the key not work? Then what?
 
The key will work fine, since you haven't changed any of the 'main' hardware. It will recognise it as the same PC, and allow you to use the key again.
 
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