Upgrade to an SSD

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kevm14
Posts: 15200
Joined: Wed Oct 23, 2013 10:28 pm

Upgrade to an SSD

Post by kevm14 »

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:
Dell disk management.png
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:
HTPC drive shrink.png
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.
HTPC C drive fragmentation.png
Running:
Auslogic defrag progress.png
Done.
Auslogic defrag finished.png
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:
HTPC drive shrink.png
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).
kevm14
Posts: 15200
Joined: Wed Oct 23, 2013 10:28 pm

Re: Upgrade to an SSD

Post by kevm14 »

2. Cloning
2a. Obtain drive cloning software. I used the open source Clonezilla for this. I used the Live CD version 2.2.3-25. Download the image and burn it to a CD. Windows 8 has a built-in image burner. Once you've created the CD, restart the system and boot off of it.

2b. You will need somewhere to put the drive image. I used a network file share. The image will only be as big as the actual data (so in my case about 31GB, not 100GB). A USB drive would also work. You could also put the image on another drive in your system, if you have multiple drives.

2c. This link has a walkthrough of an older version of Clonezilla. I didn't follow it exactly and neither should you. http://arga.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/ho ... lonezilla/

- Select Clonezilla live (default, just press enter)
- Choose language
- Don't touch keymap
- Start Clonezilla
- Device-image, to create an image file (or restore one)
- Select where you will save to or restore from. I used a SAMBA share to Windows, after making a folder and sharing it (giving full permissions). You will need your system's name, share folder to use and Windows username/pass. You could also select local_dev if you use a drive that is plugged into your current system.
- Select Expert mode
- Select savedisk. You want to save the entire disk to an image, as there are things that go beyond a single partition.
- Type a name for the image file
- Choose the source that you want to clone
- Choose the -q option for NTFS partitions (likely what you have if you have Windows)
- I went with the defaults but also checked -nfts-ok which skips checking. We'll let Windows handle that. You could have run a chkdsk /f when still on the old drive, in Windows.
- I used no compression.
- Type a very large size to avoid splitting the partition image file
- Skip checking source file system
- Check the saved image (or not) after creating.
- Do nothing when clone finishes. I like to see the results/error messages.

It should start creating the image. I did mine over the network which did a pretty good job of saturating both the source drive and my network.
HTPC clone task manager.png
When it finishes, shut down the system.
kevm14
Posts: 15200
Joined: Wed Oct 23, 2013 10:28 pm

Re: Upgrade to an SSD

Post by kevm14 »

3. Install SSD
3a. The Intel 530 retail packaging included a 3.5" adapter. As a side note, many modern SSDs are native 7mm drives (2.5" wide). The Intel 520 came with a plastic 2mm spacer so it can be installed where a 9mm drive would normally go (like my laptop). The Intel 530 goes a step further and ships with the spacer not installed. Since I was installing into the 3.5" adapter, I didn't need the spacer, which had no apparent way to fasten it to the drive anyway. So install the drive into the 3.5" adapter.

3b. Install into system. Side note: I did not have good results using the included SATA cable. Benchmark results were slower by a significant margin. Here it is installed into my HTPC drive chassis.
S7302717.JPG
4. Write clone image to SSD.
4a. Boot the system back up off the Clonezilla CD again.

4b. I don't have an options walkthrough but you will select device-image again and select where your image is stored (USB, network, etc.). Select your new SSD drive as a target.

You'll also select Expert again. The defaults need a little tweaking.

- Uncheck -g auto (probably doesn't matter if you just have Windows)
- Check -r
- Check "ignore target size before creating partitions." You will have to scroll down to find it.

That's about it. Otherwise use the same options as before, where applicable. It will prompt you TWICE to make sure you really want to write the image to the target. Let 'er rip.
kevm14
Posts: 15200
Joined: Wed Oct 23, 2013 10:28 pm

Re: Upgrade to an SSD

Post by kevm14 »

5. Boot up windows.
5a. Remove CD and restart after image writing is finished.

5b. Windows will ask to run chkdsk. Let it run, though mine found no issues.

5c. Extend volume. Go back into Disk Manager and expand the volume to fill the rest of your SSD (unless you want to create another volume with the unallocated space). This is as easy as right clicking on C: volume, then select Extend Volume. Use the maximum (default) to ensure you use all of the unallocated space.

5d. Ensure drive is aligned. Run MSINFO32 (Win 7) or MSINFO (Win 8). Select Components > Storage > Disks. Find your SSD and main OS partition (the one the size of the drive if you extended in the previous step). Find the line called Partition Starting Offset. Divide this number by 4,096. Ensure the result is a whole number. If it is, you're aligned. If not, realigning the drive requires a utility to move all of the data on the drive over by a set amount, then move it back. I won't go into that because you'll probably be fine with the current version of Clonezilla.

5e. Be sure to re-enable the page file, hibernation, system restore and memory dump if you did not do so before creating the image.

5f. If an Intel drive, install SSD toolbox and make sure you have the latest firmware. The System Tuner will tell you about your SuperFetch, defrag and other important system settings. Also, set up a drive optimization schedule. In Win 8 I don't schedule optimization but may do so manually from time to time. I feel TRIM works well in Win 8 (yes, even in IDE mode, though some folks with AMD chipsets have had trouble with this). Go ahead and run the Optimization manually regardless, since we just cloned the drive. Doesn't take very long. Let it settle down in terms of disk activity before proceeding. That may take 5-10 minutes, or more.

5g. Run benchmarks. This is where I discovered the supplied Intel cable had substandard performance. For comparison, here is how the drive performs in my HTPC, which runs a pretty old Intel ICH7 SATA-II (3Gbps) drive controller and does not have AHCI mode.
HTPC SSD back to old SATA cable.png
And here's how it did with the Intel cable:
HTPC SSD with Intel cable.png
Old WEI:
HTPC WEI.png
New WEI:
HTPC WEI.png
Note: WEI is gone in Windows 8.1.
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