Preparing SDD for HDD migration via cloning

Oh I have just checked the alignment and it appears to be good?

sgrech said:

I finally made it! It has taken me a total of around 10 hours, however i do believe that it worth the wait. The laptop boots up and is ready to use in about 33 seconds. A week ago it was taking almost 4 times as long as this. Then I cleared out loads of rubbish and defragged the drive ran disabled most programs that starting automatically when the system start up. This reduced the time to around 70 seconds, so that the current boot is about half of that.

I did as advised and created a rescue disk in Acronis and then I was able to boot from this and recover the save partition images to the newly installed SSD. This process took about 90 mins to complete.

I would like to thanks everyone who provided me with assistance. I have learnt quite a lot in the process.

I do have one final question. I have just checked in disk manager and have an unallocated space and I seem to be unable to expand the C:\ volume to take up the slack - it is greyed out

The allocated volume is over 100GB in size so I will definitely it going forward. I enlose a screen shot showing the current situation.

Thanks again.
Simon

This is sorted i think, I remove the smaller partitions are extended the main partition and now will restore the other partitions.

sgrech said:

I do have one final question. I have just checked in disk manager and have an unallocated space and I seem to be unable to expand the C:\ volume to take up the slack - it is greyed out

That's because the unallocated space is NOT immediately adjacent to the right of C. You could add that space to E, but only E.

That's a limitation of Windows Disk Management. Other tools, such as Partition Wizard, could have added the space to C.

sgrech said:

Oh I have just checked the alignment and it appears to be good?

Alignment is fine.

About all I'd do at this point is:

1: Run a benchmark on the SSD to confirm to yourself that its speeds are OK. Compare your benchmark speeds to other users results with the same drive. Google for that. The fact is that your drive may be "slower" or "faster" than other drives and models, but there's little chance you'd ever notice the difference. The advantage of SSDs is in their access time and even bad SSDs are much faster than HDDs.

2: Confirm that defrag is turned off for the SSD.

3: Establish some type of maintenance routine, possibly with CCleaner or Windows Disk Cleanup.

4: You can turn off hibernation or adjust the page file size or location if you are crowded for space on the SSD.

5: Investigate/play with whatever tools the SSD manufacturer may have provided. Intel SSDs come with a great "toolbox". I hear mixed reports about Samsung tools. Don't know about other brands.