How to Upgrade Your Existing Hard Drive in Under an Hour

How to Upgrade Your Existing Hard Drive in Under an Hour

If you’ve been eyeing the falling prices on spacious solid-state drives but putting off an upgrade because you don’t want the hassle of reinstalling everything, we here to help. Read on as we show you how to clone your old HDD onto a new HDD and get your entire system back up and running in under an hour; no reinstallation of Windows and all your apps necessary.

Why Do I Want To Do This?

Unlike popping in some new memory or adding a peripheral, upgrading a hard drive has the potential to be a real pain. Rather than go through the hassle of backing up all your documents and files, pulling your old disk, popping in a new one, formatting it, and reinstalling your OS (along with all your programs) and then tweaking everything to get it back the way it was, you can follow along with us here and have your old disk cloned, your new disk installed, and your machine up and running again in (typically) under an hour.

We used the very technique outlined in guide to upgrade all hard drives in our office PCs; the longest swap took 55 minutes and the shortest swap took 23 minutes. In both cases the actual time spent doing anything with the project was around 10 minutes (opening cases, running software, etc.) and the rest was simply the overhead imposed by the hardware we were using to perform the copy.
With that kind of turn around, and the little amount of hassle involved in actually completing the process, suddenly those much more affordable and spacious solid-state drives are looking mighty fine.

What Do I Need?

For this tutorial you’ll need four things. The first three are must have items and the fourth is variable dependent on your hardware setup and needs.
Hard Disks: The first two, and most obvious: you’ll need your existing hard drive and a second new hard drive. Ideally you’ll be migrating from a smaller drive to a larger drive, but there are situations where you may be migrating from a larger to smaller drive. If you, for instance, bought a cheap and slow 1TB mechanical HDD on sale and discovered that it wasn’t such hot disk to use as your operating system disk, you might be in the market for a smaller and faster 256GB SSD or the like.

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