I'll document my journey to this amazing upgrade in order to help anyone else planning to buy this SSD. At the time I purchased it, I paid $87.99 and I see it's at $96.00 today so it means they must've had an increase in sales...or something, not sure how the price fluctuations work. Anyway, This drive does not come with any cabling. The package only brings the CD including the Samsung Magician (drive tests and optimizations after install) and the Data Migration (cloning). I was adding this SSD to my HP Envy 17 m-j1020x which has an extra slot for a 2nd drive. That was a relief to see the first time I opened it because I did not want to lose the 1TB space I had even though that hard drive was painfully slow. The drive fits loosely on the extra slot and I noticed the original drive had a rubber outline which took care of the extra space and gave the drive a tight fit. I started looking for something similar to buy for my new SSD but I couldn't see these "rubber rails" ANYWHERE! until I YouTubed how to add a 2nd drive to my specific laptop model and an actual video existed from a website: www.newmodeus.com/. the video had a direct link to buy a kit which included the rubber rails and the SATA cable with the exact length needed from the 2nd drive slot to the 2nd SATA connector. It was a blessing!
After installing the drive and booting up the computer, it did not show up anywhere at first. I gave it a second reboot and I could see it in Disk Management. Check. I had read a few things about cloning your OS from the old hard drive to the new SSD and basically you have to shrink your OS volume with any programs you'd like to keep on the SSD to be less than the size of the SSD. So I did that, moving all my media (Pictures, Videos, Music) to my backup drive temporarily. the new size of the volume was about 92 GB, which included everything except my media (Programs and OS files). I also had to account for about 25 GB for the recovery partition, so in total I was looking at ~117 GB to copy to the SSD from my old drive.
The Data Migration software that came with the drive is a big disappointment. I had read mixed reviews about it, mostly bad, but was hoping it would go well for me just to make things easier. Well it never got close to working. There was barely any chance to customize the cloning and it kept listing the SSD's name as the source even though it displayed the size of my 1TB HDD. Every time I would try to start the cloning, it would say that the source disk had been disconnected 5 seconds after clicking "Start". A co worker had previously mentioned Acronis for drive/OS cloning and I had also seen some good things about it online. So I purchased a copy for $50 from their site. Totally worth it! Setting up the cloning was a breeze, plus it gave me options to customize every aspect of it. This software also has many other great features like backup which I have not yet had the chance to experiment with but I am definitely looking forward to, so I highly recommend it.
After setting up the options for the cloning, I clicked on start and asked me to restart. After booting up, it booted to Acronis' cloning screen, since it obviously can't clone the drive while you're running the OS. The process took a little bit less than an hour. The computer booted again and was still booting to the old HDD but I noticed I could see the SSD clone of my C: drive and the recovery partition. Now I needed to figure out how to tell Windows 10 where to boot from, which isn't as easy as in previous versions. I have yet to see an option to boot up to the BIOS or other pre-OS settings. Windows 10 has a setting that lets you choose where to boot from, whether HDD/SSD, USB drive, or CD. When you ask it to let you pick it does a reboot, then a menu comes up with the mentioned options. I chose HDD/SSD but it didn't let me pick which one!! DOH! so it booted up again to my painfully slow HDD. I turned it off again, opened up the back of the laptop, disconnected the HDD and booted.....WOILA! it booted so fast to the SSD that I was a little dizzy haha. Seriously, it was incredibly fast. I signed in and that also was ridiculously fast. The OS was ready to go within a second of signing in, with everything loaded. I checked the drives and the new partitions were there, beautifully set up as C: and D: for OS/Programs and Recovery partitions. I turned it off, plugged back the HDD, and booted...incredibly fast again. I knew my SSD had stayed as the new permanent boot drive at that point. Signed in and I saw my old partitions there as F: and J: which were the names I had given to the SSD partitions originally. So the letter switching happened all on its own, which I was kind of stressing doing myself.
So that's it! I tested opening up things and man.....what a freaking difference. This is the best upgrade you can give your PC if you have a slow HDD, 5400 rpm in my case. But honestly, it'll be a 200x difference even with a 7200 or 10000 rpm HDD. Amazing. I currently have 8 GB of memory and plan to take it to the 16 GB max in the next couple of months, but I am good to go with this beauty for now.
Hope this was helpful.
| Standing screen display size | 10 Centimeters |
|---|---|
| Hard Drive | 250 GB Solid State Drive |
