Picked up a 512GB Samsung 850 Pro specifically for my Gaming/HTPC a month ago and didn't have the time to migrate until today. I have almost all SSDs in my office rig, but my living room PC has been the red-headed stepchild a bit. I'm one of those people who usually LIKES the excuse to start fresh with an OS, but I wanted to see how far drive cloning has come since the last time I performed it outside of vanilla workstation install imaging. I finally got around to moving off my Seagate Hybrid 750GB 2.5" drive and planned to do a full re-install of everything if the migration failed, but was pleasantly surprised with the results of the free version of the EaseUS backup software's clone function. I first tried the included Samsung migration software, then ran into issues running Clonezilla (because source drive was bigger) and really didn't want to wait around for image creation. I found EaseUS through a Tom's Hardware article and gave it a go... About the only odd thing it did was re-size the System Reserved partition to nearly half the drive. This might have been my fault by not tweaking some settings ahead of time, but the system rebooted fine on the first try. I then downloaded their partition management software (also free) and shrunk the System Reserved partition back down to normal and extended C: to fill in the space. I've been throwing everything at it and seems stable, so for a free software, that one seems to work really well. My system is anything from pristine or well maintained and so far it seems like a winner. What spurred me along to do the migration was the constant pack/unpack of the Watch_Dogs files... When I say a fraction of the time to pack 3.6GB, it really seems to be a tenth easily... Anyway, I just thought I'd pass on the first-try success story if it helps anyone else. www.easeus.com Cheers!
Windows then still treats the SSD as a hard drive . It's almost always better to do a fresh install and if you're clever it can be done very quickly. Most people make mistakes though, like installing Windows in legacy mode unsteady of UEFI, asking other things.
That's not really a mistake, I've done both and I vastly prefer a legacy CSM install. The difference in boot times is negligible anyway.
