Upgrading an NVMe storage unit holding the Windows boot disk.

[Rudel_chw]

Hello,

My PC had six storage drives, the fastest being a 1 TB NVMe unit which held Windows, a few software like Office and Adobe, and DCS. The remaining drives included one SSD of 1 TB where I held my documents and my Lightroom photo collection, plus 4 older hard drives for Backups and lesser games.

 

As the 1TB nvme drive was getting cramped, as DCS alone used over 600 GB, I have now finally bit the bullet and purchased a 2 TB unit to use as an upgrade. I know that many people swear by Gen.5 units, but those are still hideusly expensive on my country and would force me to upgrade the motherboard as well (this is my current MB: https://pg.asrock.com/mb/AMD/B550 Phantom Gaming 4/index.asp), so I ended up purchasing a Gen.4 unit at a price of US$ 175, this one:

 

 

I wanted to share a few highlights about the install process, in case it might help other users:

 

1) First, I wanted to avoid a Windows reinstall, as I've spent a lot of time tuning my Windows and drivers and wanted to avoid doing it all over again, so I needed to clone the drive.

2) Since my MB has two M2 slots, I opted to mount both drives simultaneously and then perform the cloning. The software I chose to use was a 30-day trial version of Macrium Reflect: https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

This software has the advantage of running within Windows, so no need for boot pendrives nor running DOS-like front-ends.

3) To avoid any chance of error, as I have so many drives, I disconnected the Sata cables of all my existing drives, leaving just the two NVMe units connected.

This is my motherboard with the GPU removed and just my original 1 TB unit:

 

 

And here is the new drive already installed on the secondary M2 slot:

 

 

I start Windows and then start the Cloning software:

 

 

Disk 1 is my existing Windows drive and the new unit was detected automatically as Disk 2, we can see it is empty. The One Drive message can be ignored, it is caused by having all my other drives disconnected during the cloning.

I click on "Clone this Disk" and the software automatically offers to clone the disk while at the same time enlarge the partition 3 to take advantage of the larger destination drive, like this:

 

 

The cloning took about 30 minutes and then I powered off the PC, removed my original 1 TB drive and moved the new 2 TB unit onto its slot. I would have loved to leave both NVMe on the PC, but unfortunately my motherboard disables 3 of its 6 Sata ports when using the secondary M2 slot, so I chose to just replace my original 1TB with the 2 TB one, to keep all of my other drivers operational. The free NVMe will be sold at the 2nd hand market or used to upgrade my spare PC.

So, that's all, I can highly recommend this cloning software, worked perfectly.

Best regards to all,

 

Eduardo

 

 

[LucShep]

Yep, pretty good!  
Potential "sticky thread" material, as it sure can help others.

One side note I'd like to add is that, with most cloning drive software (BTW, I too prefer Macrium Reflect Free) you can also resize partitions in the destination drive.
Either by readjusting partition limits with mouse, or by inserting a desired size number for the specific partition.
This can be usefull if you decide to increase or decrease a certain partition that you're cloning, in the destination drive, right before you advance with the cloning process.

Edited July 24, 2024 by LucShep

[Smashy]

Macrium is awesome.  I used it for my last upgrade too.  If you're paranoid like me, I'd suggest creating an image and putting it on an external or to-be-disconnected internal drive before the clone.  That way if anything goes wrong, you'll have a copy of your C drive to revert from.  Hardware is replaceable, data isn't.  If there's a way to <profanity> things up, I'd find a way.

[Rudel_chw]

16 minutes ago, Smashy said:

If you're paranoid like me, I'd suggest creating an image and putting it on an external or to-be-disconnected internal drive before the clone. 

 

 my paranoia went only so far as to unplug all my other drives, leaving just the old NVMe and the new one, at that point it was pretty hard to mess things up, I would have had to find a way to clone the old disk onto itself  

Now that I have space, I'm installing a 2nd instance of DCS, one will have DCS 2.9.5, to run FC3-based aircraft mods and to employ the Lua Console of DCS-BIOS, while the other will have the latest version of DCS:

 

 

[BitMaster]

One of those things you better get right first time !

 

It got as lot easier since Windows 10 or later do not need a bootloader and can start right off the actual disk.

I usually use Acronis but I have company licenses for that and do understand that is maybe too much for a one time task.

 

Anyway, it worked !