Question Your process for replacing a NVME boot drive?

[Dannar26]

SSD prices are the mirror opposite of GPU prices -- absurd, but absurdly low. Picked up a 980 pro 1TB NVME m.2 drive refurb off of Best Buy. I've done this before with BB; the drives are usually never used or used so little it makes no difference. My guess is that it's normies who don't know the difference between form factors, and realize too late they don't have a m.2 port. Anyway...

One of my kid's rigs is running a WD SN550 1TB drive as their one and only drive. This is one of those DRAM-less models that the interweb says are best used for back-up/game drive storage. It was what I had at the time I built the rig in 2020. So, I figure I'd put this Samsung drive into the aforementioned rig. It seems a shame to me to relegate the faster drive to being the backup, so I'd like to do the ol' switcheroo. 980 pro to boot, SN550 for backup storage. It's a Ryzen 3600 system, but I can't remember if I used a mobo that supports PCIE 4.0. I wonder how big of an impact that makes, if any.

I want to avoid doing a fresh install. I used an OEM key for Windows, so I'd rather not have to struggle with reactivation if that's still a ah heck. Not to mention, I'd also like to not have to re-do all the customizations.

How would you do it? I'm vaguely aware that there's cloning software out there. Would I simply put the new faster drive on the secondary m.2 slot, and run the cloning software? Then switch them physically, boot from new faster drive in the primary m.2 slot (it gets more lanes right?), and then format the old drive? To map it out:

1) Install 980 pro to available m.2
2) boot as normal, disk management to see the new 980 pro, run cloning software to it
3) swap physical location of drives
4) boot from new drive (hopefully the system doesn't "look" to boot from the previous drive here)
5) format SN550

Am I missing anything?

 

[Tech Junky]

Cloning will also duplicate the uuid and cause issues. You'll have to remove the original and change the uuid and then put it back in as storage. Or swap them now in the M2 sockets and clone and boot to USB Linux and change the uuid and you'll be done w/o having to open the case again.

 

[Shmee]

Cloning will also duplicate the uuid and cause issues. You'll have to remove the original and change the uuid and then put it back in as storage. Or swap them now in the M2 sockets and clone and boot to USB Linux and change the uuid and you'll be done w/o having to open the case again.

I am not sure about this, if the clone goes right, one should be able to select the new Windows boot manager, boot, and then format the old drive. You could do format in Windows, or Linux, or even some bootable utility that you might use for the cloning process.

But to Tech Junky's point, when cloning and or formatting, there can always be issues, you never know. So...

I would highly recommend first making an image of the drive, and saving it in some external media like an external drive or NAS. Just in case there are issues or something is missed/messed up. It is good to make the backup anyway.

Easy thing to do, if you have a NAS, is to save the image there, then restore the image to the new drive using the backup software.

 

[Tech Junky]

Tech Junky's point

The reason I mention it is because I was being lazy not following my own protocols in my laptop and ran into the issue. Somewhere along the lines it also installed the boot efi on the slower drive for both drives to boot from. So, in my instance I didn't feel like peeling the laptop apart after doing it. If op has an enclosure it's the easiest way to make sure there's not a conflict when done. Then format the storage drive and put it back in the system.

Another thing was dealing with uefi and converting to gpt. Cloning in the days of MBR only was simple.

 

[Hans Gruber]

I am against cloning. The ghost in the machine type stuff always happens. If you have a backup PC or something that doesn't need to be reliable. Clone away. I would simply using Windows to wipe the M2 drive and reinstall a fresh copy of windows on the new drive.

 

[BFG10K]

I regularly clone NVMe to SATA as a backup and there's no problem having both in the system at once.

By default it boots to NVMe (last known good) but it's easy to F8 and boot from SATA to test everything works fine.