What’s the best way?

[BlacleyCole]

My laptop’s ssd drive is full I’m going to replace the sata m.2 500 Gb drive with a 2tb sata ssd m.2 that I’ve already bought. If someone can tell me that a nvme m.2 would be better or faster I will get one.

 

But my delima is how to replace it the easy and best way. Weather to clone existing drive to new larger drive and delete the excess stuff. Or delete it then clone. Or install os and apps fresh on the new drive. Which way is the easiest and best way or something I haven’t thought of. Know fresh install will. Take longer and I’ll need to. Do something on dcs’s Profile web site to deactivate my mods but I wish not to have to do that.

[Headwarp]

Easiest way IMO is to download all the drivers for your laptop system and devices (Find these on the manufacturer's website) to a USB flash drive or DVD-Rom and then do a fresh install of windows. It may take longer get things setup and download/install the latest windows updates, but it eliminates a lot of room for error. Not to mention if something does go wrong, you can plug the old drive in and likely still boot. If using win10 - there's a tool you can download to create a bootable USB flash drive for installation purposes. Not to mention - if there happens to be any malware on your system, a fresh install in most cases takes care of that, as well as programs that create registry entries when installed.

 

You can save all your DCS joystick profiles individually in the game and reload them on a fresh install with the import/export features in the controller menus. Worth adding to your usb drive or DVD-Rom.

 

USB Flash drives are getting pretty big these days as well. You could get one that holds 256Gb or more than one and put anything on your current drive that you'd like to keep on it, but if you have fast internet and the stuff you have is easy to download and reinstall it isn't a big concern. Might be pricey, but - as long as you can keep track of the tiny things, it'll be there if you need it for similar purposes in the future. Just make sure to use the "Copy" and not the move function, should something go wrong so you can just plug the old drive in should the need for it arise.

 

It looks like there might be adapters out there as well for converting m2 drives to USB for extra storage and if you wanted to recover specific files, but not having used them myself, I can't really be too helpful there.

 

I will say that cloning the drive could be quite tedious, as it seems you're going to be replacing the drive you want to clone. You'd have to clone it to another drive into the system, which may or may not need to be empty, set the other drive up as a boot drive in bios, clone the drive again to the new drive, and then set bios to boot off the new NVME. Unless you have another nvme slot.

 

A a SATA m2 drive is also considerably slower than a PCI-E m2 drive, sata III is sata III, but I run DCS fine on a sata III SSD. That's all up to personal preference, budget, and hardware capability. The compatibility should be well documented in your laptops manual, which you can also likely find on the manufacturer's website.

Edited June 8, 2018 by Headwarp

[BlacleyCole]

Question I bought the Acer laptop and as I recall no disks came with it I’ll have to check when I get home and see if the second drive has the os to install it. Iirc there should be something on one of the two drive to install as it came from the factory am I correct for the new systems that come with discs

[Headwarp]

https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/support

 

Unfortuneately, I can't say alot without knowing your specific OS and the model of your laptop.

 

Looking at a random Acer Predator model, the safety guide recommends not servicing your system yourself, specifically not opening it up.

 

The user manual, which you will be able to download from their website, also describes the "Factory backup" process which involves a 16GB USB Flash drive, which they also recommend creating as soon as you get your new laptop. User manuals for personal computers are your friend, my friend. hehe. I'm very uncertain if you'd be able to use such a feature to install windows to the new drive with whatever Acer had preconfigured for the laptop, or a new drive at all.

 

It should still technically be possible to install just a fresh copy of windows using the windows media creation tool if using windows 10, which can be downloaded from microsoft, but again you'd want download all of the drivers from the acer support page and apps prior to swapping out the drives and putting them on a formatted USB flash drive, and perhaps another usb drive for the bootable windows installation media to rule out any networking errors that may occur should Windows 10 not have an appropriate driver for your network interfaces, so you'll already have all your system drivers. I have no idea however, whether Acer might have some kind of tailored package with their copy of windows. I wouldn't imagine there would be any problem with the windows license, which the key for might be on a sticker on the laptop even if OEM since the actual hardware will still mostly be the same.

 

Despite the warnings to not open up the laptop yourself, I saw at least one post where someone on the Acer forums mentioned swapping his m2 SSD. I bet the Acer forums could provide you with much more accurate information regarding your product than the DCS forums could, they're all Acer users, my desktop is a Frankenstein monster compared to your laptop, although much easier to upgrade and swap things out.

 

If you call or email Acer support, they might be tell you a lot more than I could give you even if I had access to the manual for your specific model.

Edited June 8, 2018 by Headwarp

[BitMaster]

I would double check that your M2 socket supports PCIe-4x with NVMe protocol.

 

Some laptops have M2 sockets that only support Sata protocol, make sure yours does before you buy.