Upgrade to an SSD
Posted: Fri Aug 15, 2014 3:28 pm
My trusty HTPC running Windows Media Center (on Windows 7) has given me nearly 5 trouble free years of service. And switching to over the air TV (with the fantastic DVR functionality of WMC) has paid for this machine 4 times over. One thing I've always wanted to do was switch the boot drive to an SSD. This was a thing even back when I built the system but upon seeing the price of an Intel 530 120GB SSD at Newegg ($80), I just had to pull the trigger.
There was nothing wrong with the Western Digital 320GB 7200rpm boot drive I had been using, and I knew 120GB would be more than adequate since this system has no need for a large OS drive (it's just Windows). However, upgrading to an SSD without reinstalling essentially requires the OS drive to be cloned to the SSD. But that high level goal is actually broken down into several key pieces, as I performed it.
I will preface this guide by saying I had intended to clone drive to drive, with both connected to the system. That did not pan out. I had to make an image first. In the end, that just means this guide should work for any single drive system even though my HTPC currently uses three drives.
1. Preparing the drive for cloning.
1a. What this really means is I needed to shrink the partition to be a little smaller than the SSD. Typically for SSD upgrades, the SSD will be smaller than the HDD (due to economics). If not, skip this step. Windows can shrink a live NTFS partition but there's a gotcha. It can only shrink contiguous free space. What that means is there can't be files/data spread all over the drive. If you are thinking defrag, you're correct. Run defrag on your OS drive.
1b. Open the disk manager. In Windows 7, right click on Computer and select Manage, then select Disk Management. Find your OS drive (probably C:) and right click on the main partition. Select Shrink Volume. I was able to knock 37GB off my partition but I needed to get my 320GB drive down below 120GB so I'd need a lot more than that. Here is the Disk Manager on my desktop: Right click on the C: drive and select Shrink Volume. It will tell you how much you can shrink by. What you want to see is something like this: But that's not what I saw at first.
If it says you can shrink enough to be under your new SSD size, then go ahead and just click shrink. By the way, when sizing how far to shrink, be sure to take into account the subtleties of the base-2 drive size reporting. If I had a 320GB drive, and my SSD was 120GB, what I actually have is a 298GB drive and a 111GB drive. 320 / (1.024^3) = 298GB. Likewise, 120 / (1.024^3) = 111GB. So you'll need to shrink enough to be under this amount (not the advertised capacity).
1c. Now I was pursuing extra contiguous free space. I did the following:
Disable swap file
Disable hibernation
Disable system restore
Disable write debugging
Defragment again. That got me a little further. But I knew it was time for a 3rd party defragmentation tool. I used Auslogics Disk Defrag. Get it here: http://download.cnet.com/Auslogics-Disk ... 67503.html
Sure enough, I had my Master File Table taking up space right at the end of the volume, which is why I couldn't shrink any further. Running: Done. Interestingly, it still showed MFT at the end of the volume. But when I checked again how much I could shrink, I was pleasantly surprised: I could shrink all the way down to the ~31GB of data that actually existed on my boot drive. I elected to shrink down to about 100GB to be safely under the 111GB SSD drive size.
Finally the drive partition is small enough to fit onto the SSD. Optionally, you could try software like g-parted but I elected to use Windows to resize the partition.
Once you've successfully shrunk the partition, you can turn back on all of the things you turned off originally, like the page file, hibernation and system restore. Either that, or you'll want to re-enable those things after cloning (it would save a little time/space of the image).
There was nothing wrong with the Western Digital 320GB 7200rpm boot drive I had been using, and I knew 120GB would be more than adequate since this system has no need for a large OS drive (it's just Windows). However, upgrading to an SSD without reinstalling essentially requires the OS drive to be cloned to the SSD. But that high level goal is actually broken down into several key pieces, as I performed it.
I will preface this guide by saying I had intended to clone drive to drive, with both connected to the system. That did not pan out. I had to make an image first. In the end, that just means this guide should work for any single drive system even though my HTPC currently uses three drives.
1. Preparing the drive for cloning.
1a. What this really means is I needed to shrink the partition to be a little smaller than the SSD. Typically for SSD upgrades, the SSD will be smaller than the HDD (due to economics). If not, skip this step. Windows can shrink a live NTFS partition but there's a gotcha. It can only shrink contiguous free space. What that means is there can't be files/data spread all over the drive. If you are thinking defrag, you're correct. Run defrag on your OS drive.
1b. Open the disk manager. In Windows 7, right click on Computer and select Manage, then select Disk Management. Find your OS drive (probably C:) and right click on the main partition. Select Shrink Volume. I was able to knock 37GB off my partition but I needed to get my 320GB drive down below 120GB so I'd need a lot more than that. Here is the Disk Manager on my desktop: Right click on the C: drive and select Shrink Volume. It will tell you how much you can shrink by. What you want to see is something like this: But that's not what I saw at first.
If it says you can shrink enough to be under your new SSD size, then go ahead and just click shrink. By the way, when sizing how far to shrink, be sure to take into account the subtleties of the base-2 drive size reporting. If I had a 320GB drive, and my SSD was 120GB, what I actually have is a 298GB drive and a 111GB drive. 320 / (1.024^3) = 298GB. Likewise, 120 / (1.024^3) = 111GB. So you'll need to shrink enough to be under this amount (not the advertised capacity).
1c. Now I was pursuing extra contiguous free space. I did the following:
Disable swap file
Disable hibernation
Disable system restore
Disable write debugging
Defragment again. That got me a little further. But I knew it was time for a 3rd party defragmentation tool. I used Auslogics Disk Defrag. Get it here: http://download.cnet.com/Auslogics-Disk ... 67503.html
Sure enough, I had my Master File Table taking up space right at the end of the volume, which is why I couldn't shrink any further. Running: Done. Interestingly, it still showed MFT at the end of the volume. But when I checked again how much I could shrink, I was pleasantly surprised: I could shrink all the way down to the ~31GB of data that actually existed on my boot drive. I elected to shrink down to about 100GB to be safely under the 111GB SSD drive size.
Finally the drive partition is small enough to fit onto the SSD. Optionally, you could try software like g-parted but I elected to use Windows to resize the partition.
Once you've successfully shrunk the partition, you can turn back on all of the things you turned off originally, like the page file, hibernation and system restore. Either that, or you'll want to re-enable those things after cloning (it would save a little time/space of the image).