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SSD Boot Drive: What You Need to Know and How to Set It Up



If you're still using a traditional, spinning hard disk on your PC, you're missing out. Swapping it out for a solid-state drive (SSD) is one of the best upgrades you can make in terms of speeding up your computer. It'll boot faster, programs will launch instantly, and games won't take so long to load anymore.


Obviously, in order to upgrade to an SSD, you'll need to, well, buy an SSD. We have some recommendations, but if you're on a budget, we have a separate list of cheap SSDs as well. Make sure to buy the right form factor for your computer (some laptops will use 2.5-inch drives, while others might use M.2 or mSATA drives), and get one big enough to fit all your data. If you have a 500GB hard drive now, you should probably spring for a similarly sized SSD (or larger, to accommodate future data).




how to set ssd as boot drive




There are many different drive-cloning tools on the market, and unfortunately there's no free, one-size-fits-all option. If your drive manufacturer offers a migration program, that might be your best bet. For example, if you bought a Samsung SSD, we recommend downloading Samsung Data Migration(Opens in a new window) and following the instructions in the user guide. Western Digital and SanDisk users can use WD's version of Acronis True Image(Opens in a new window) to copy their data using these instructions(Opens in a new window).


Before you start messing with drives and formatting partitions, it's absolutely necessary to back up your data first. An accidental click can result in you erasing everything, so do not continue until you've backed it all up.


If you don't have a backup yet, check out our favorite software for the job. Windows also has File History for backing up important documents, and an image file can save your entire system. Copying important data to an external hard drive will also do in a pinch.


If you're upgrading to an SSD that's smaller than your current hard drive, you'll want to take extra care here. This isn't as common as it once was, thanks to bigger, less expensive SSDs, but if that's the case for you, you'll need to delete some files and free up space on your hard drive before cloning it. Otherwise, your data won't fit on the new drive. Once your data is safe and secure, continue to the next step.


Plug your SSD into the SATA-to-USB adapter, then plug that into your computer. If it's a brand-new drive, you probably won't see the drive pop up in File Explorer, but don't worry; it just needs to be initialized first. Open the Start menu and type "partitions" in the search box. Click the Create and format hard disk partitions option, and Disk Management will open. It will prompt you to initialize the drive using either the GPT or MBR partition table.


If you aren't prompted to initialize the drive, and don't see it in Disk Management, double-check that it's properly connected to your computer, and that the enclosure or dock is powered on (if necessary). See our guide to troubleshooting a hard drive that won't show up for more.


If your SSD is significantly smaller than your old drive, this may require an extra step. Reflect will attempt to automatically shrink partitions with free space to fit it all on the drive, but in my experience, it doesn't always do this intelligently, and may leave out one of Windows' recovery partitions. If you experience this problem, you can manually drag each partition down to the SSD, and click Cloned Partition Properties on your main C: drive to resize it manually.


Next, shut down your computer. It's time to install that SSD in your machine permanently. If you have a laptop with only one hard drive slot, you'll need to remove your old hard drive and replace it with your SSD. This is a bit different on every laptop.


From there, look for your BIOS's boot options. These will be in a different spot depending on your computer, but once you find them, select the option to change the boot sequence. Choose your SSD from the list as the first boot drive, then head back to the BIOS's main menu to exit, saving your settings.


Your computer will reboot, and if all went well, it should plop you back into Windows faster than ever before. Open File Explorer and check to confirm that your SSD is, in fact, the C: drive. If everything looks good, you're ready to rock.


If your old drive is still installed, you can erase it and use it to store extra files, or you can disconnect it entirely. Best of all, your computer should feel significantly snappier without having to start from scratch.


By default, Raspberry Pi boots up and stores all of its programs on a microSD memory card, which has a maximum theoretical bandwidth of 50 MBps on the Raspberry Pi 4 and just 25 MBps on prior models. In real-life, even the best microSD cards for Raspberry Pi get no faster than about 38 MBps in sequential writes. Using an external SSD as your main storage drive could speed things up significantly and, with a few commands and a simple firmware update, you can do just that.


In our real-life tests of a Raspberry Pi 4 with SSD last year we got impressive performance with sequential transfer rates as high as 140 MB / 208 MBps for reading and writing. You can also use a standard USB flash drive, though we found the performance worse than a microSD card on many tasks.


The latest versions of Raspberry Pi OS (as of April 29 2021 or later) have many of the necessary changes built-in. The Raspberry Pi Imager now has a much simpler means to prepare a Raspberry Pi 4 / 400 for USB boot. These instructions will set the Raspberry Pi 4 / 400 to look for a USB boot device, if none is found it will then boot from the micro SD card.


9. Into your Raspberry Pi, insert a micro SD card with Raspberry Pi OS and boot from micro SD to the desktop. This may take a little longer as the Raspberry Pi is looking for USB boot devices. If you do not have a Raspberry Pi OS micro SD card, follow our how to setup Raspberry Pi guide.


11. Select the Copy From Device (micro SD card), and the Copy To Device (the SSD). Double check that the correct drives are selected and click Start to copy the files across. The process should take around ten minutes to complete.


Keep in mind that, if you are using an external drive that saps a lot of power from the bus, you may have issues (which you could probably solve by using a drive that has its own power source or by using a powered USB hub).


For example, we had problems using a bus-powered, external Kingston HyperX SSD, which booted but -- perhaps because of how much power it was using -- none of our peripherals would work. A SATA SSD in a externally powered dock worked fine as did a USB Flash drive.


I have just gotten a SSD for christmas (samsung 860 EVO 1TB) and was wondering how to change the boot drive to the SSD and then later move over the files that I want, like steam library and such. The big thing is that I want to keep all of the junk on the HDD so it doesn't clutter up the SSD. I've seen a lot of tips on migration but as said before, that's not quite what I'm after. I guess my question is: Is there any way to just install a clean copy of windows 10 home on my ssd, but still access and transfer files from the HDD?


Yes, you can install a clean copy of Windows onto your new SSD while using your old drive to hold files like your steam library. Just know that while your files are preserved, the clean install of Windows means that you probably will have a lot of work to do getting things set up the way you had them before. Migration is a better solution if you don't want a fresh start.


option 1) depending on the size of your HDD or if you have a > 1TB hdd, but less than 1TB of data, you can use an imaging program like Acronis True Image (my personal fav) and image your 1TB onto the SSD. Then, make sure your boot order in your BIOS loads the SSD (not the previous HDD). When the SSD boots, format your HDD (quick format would be fine), and then you can transfer your files off of the SSD to the HDD that you don't want to keep on the SSD (provided they aren't critical system files or installed application files).


option 2) If your hard drive is > 1TB or has > 1 TB of files making imaging to the SSD not possible, then if you have a spare HDD around, take a backup of your HDD (imaging program or manual file copy would be fine). AFTER, and ONLY AFTER, you backed up the files successfully, you can delete data files (files that aren't critical to computer operation or files created by installed apps), start removing them to get you under the 1TB mark so you can image the drive onto the SSD.


I know with Steam, transferring your games can be done in one of two ways. If you add your HDD with all the files in it already, you can go into Steam, then go to Steam > Settings > Downloads and click on the button [Steam Library Folders]. From there, you can change the C:\Program Files... location to D:\Program Files... where your HDD is now labeled as (since your SSD should load as your C drive in windows).


In all cases (options 1-3) since you may not want to format your HDD with all your programs on it, it will still be capable of booting, so you will want to go into the BIOS and 1) make sure you set the SSD to the first bootable device (or first after floppy, CD, USB, etc); 2) disable the HDD as a bootable option.


"I recently purchased a 250GB SSD and I want to install Windows 10 on it to become my primary boot drive, and then make my existing HDD purely for storage. My question is: How do I use the SSD only as boot drive and use the HDD as a storage/usage drive, where all programs, games, and such will be stored and used on. What would be the best way to go about making this transition?"


SSD has higher speed and stronger stability while HDD has larger capacity. Do you know how to setup SSD and HDD in your computer to make it work best? Actually, nowadays more and more users choose to use SSD for OS and HDD for storage to get both better performance and larger capacity. To be honest, that is really a good choice. You can make full use their advantages to help your computer gain the best performance. So if you are currently using HDD as the boot drive, you can choose to move the Windows system from HDD to SSD and then set SSD as the boot drive. And then use the HDD with a larger capacity to store personal data, files, and applications. In this passage, you will learn how to set SSD as boot drive and HDD as storage drive in Windows computer. 2ff7e9595c


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