Copying hard drive to SSD

I have been getting frustrated with the speed of my hard drive (1TB) and so i have decided to go the SSD route .Unfortunately the cost of a 1TB SSD is too expensive , so i have decided to go for a 500GB and then use the orginal drive as a 2nd drive storing all the hungry data .
I have only used 242Gb of the 1TB drive so space would not be a problem on the new drive (especially when i delete a load of rubbish) , the question i want to know is do i reduce the hard drive partition to 500gb on my 1tb drive and then copy to the new 500Gb SSD , or do i do it another way .I want an exact copy of my current drive on the new SSD >i have never gone smaller on my copying always upgraded in size , so a little worried .

IBM Thinkpad T410 laptop , Core i5 , 4gb Ram (will be uprading to 8Gb soon )
1tb hard drive (5400rpm) with a 320Gb hard drive (5400rpm) in DVD bay as backup / storage .

Thanks for any help :-D

 

I bought a Samsung 250g, I used their migration software to copy my 640g drive it worked flawlessly. I am not saying for sure it will do the same in you case, if you have windows media you could do a fresh load on the CD then slave you big drive.

 

Oldphil ,
Thanks for suggestion i am considering Crucial SSD here in Uk and was hoping to just do a staright drive clone as i have a 2 drive cloning station , but didnt know if it would look at a 1tb drive ( even though reduced to 500GB )and not copy to a 500gb , does it look at partition size of disc when copying or physcial size

 

I picked up a 240GB intel ssd from ebay a few months back. Can't believe the difference. It is well worth the effort. The drive came with a Acronis true image 2014 software which makes the transition easier. You still need to resize the partitions. (Make a backup before you start!)

Intel offer a program Intel® Solid-State Drive Toolbox https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/18455 which was my belt and braces for getting the strange overworldly techno-stuff working. I'm still using XP PRO SP3.

s.

 

Don't know what happened to my post. I have been promoting Major geeks since the days on lineone.net... I have nothing to sell. I delight in the advancement of technology but my first IBM compatible desktop ran MSDOS. I upgraded to a machine with a 40MB hard drive. SSD computing is truly other-worldly not overworldly. I wanted to edit my post - spelling mistake and was saddened to find I couldn't.
Please sort this out.
s.

 

Deep apologies. It has been a while since I have been forum-ing. And thank you for offering... It is a delight to post on the majorgeeks site. My dislike for spelling mistakes runs from failing English language 'O' level 7 times. Editing has been my saviour. s.

 

Stephen_c's suggestion of the Intel program sounds good to me, if will let you copy larger -> smaller.

I offer the following suggestion for comment by those more knowledgeable.

If you can partition your hard disk into a two partitions (or shrink the current 1TB partition) into a smaller partition containing your stuff and an empty partition which may or may or may not be formatted, some cloning (eg the Easeus one that I use) programs will clone by partition (or you might consider making two logical drives). This can be done in Windows Disk Management.

However, if your stuff is spread out on the disk I don't know whether this possible without damaging the data; in fact I don't know if this process of shrinking will damage your stuff even if your stuff is copacted into one area at the 'start' of your disk.....hence my request for 'expert' comment.

Dumb_Question
1.March.2015

 

For what's it worth I spent days defragging before I reduced the size of the partition...
Why backing up is vital.
s.

 

I agree that backing up is vital, even if that means buying a third HD to carry it out to (in this case).

But you have answered my question: one way, at least, of copy a system to a smaller SSD is:
defrag the HD -> make a smaller partition on the HD containing your data + system -> clone this partition to SSD.

But the Intel program is likely to be an easier solution.

Dumb_Question
2.March.2015

 

I've always used Acronis for this.

 

Have you looked at this? http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/ctssdinstallac
It comes with Acronis!

 

I used to use Acronis, but they changed recently and I switched to Macrium.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/content/p....com/showthread.php?t=290983&ss=2104j844074j7

When I purchased my SSD, I simply made an image of my original drive and did a restore to the new SSD. - took all of 10 minutes and worked flawlessly.

Your 240GB of info will will not be a problem and after restore, look for Windows.Old - move it to your secondary drive, that will reduce your space by about 80GBs.

Don't forget to make a boot cd - instructions on main Macrium page.

Good luck!

P.S. - When you make the image, it is reduced to 60 % of data - in your case to approx 144GBs.