Finally upgrading to an SSD

I’ve been thinking about replacing the old hard drive in my desktop PC with an SSD for quite some time. I bought the PC in 2016, from Costco. It’s a Dell XPS 8900, with a 1TB 7200RPM SATA drive in it. Other than the old-fashioned spinning hard drive, it’s a reasonably powerful machine. But I think the hard drive is really slowing it down.

Until recently, 1 TB SSDs seemed a bit too expensive, so I thought about sticking a 500 GB SSD in it, using that as a boot drive, and keeping the old 1 TB drive for “miscellaneous data” (photos, music, video files, etc). But thinking about all the grief involved in doing a clean install of Windows 10 on the 500 GB drive, then reinstalling apps and moving stuff around, sounded like too much work.

It looks like 1 TB SSDs have finally come down to a price that seems reasonable to me, so I went ahead and ordered one today. I got a Crucial MX500 from Amazon for $189. I’d looked at it earlier this year, and it was $250 then. I thought about it at that price, but didn’t talk myself into it. I guess $189 is finally low enough to push me over the edge and get past my indecision. I also ordered this mounting bracket, though I’m not sure I need it. And the drive was eligible for free same-day shipping, so I should have it today. (The bracket won’t show up until Monday though.)

So my plan is to hook it up tomorrow and image the old drive to the new one. I figure that should take all day. I’ll use the version of Acronis True Image that Crucial includes with the drive. I have an external dock I can use to hook it up via USB, or I can try to mount it internally, if that’s possible without the bracket. Then, maybe Monday night, I’ll try to boot from it, with the old drive unplugged. If that works, then I’ll give it a couple of weeks and see how it goes. If everything is OK, I’ll plug the old drive back it, format it, and use it as a backup drive.

I’m wondering if Windows 10 is going to give me any grief about having moved to a new drive. I’ve occasionally heard tales of people having issues when they try to transfer an OEM copy of Windows 10 to a new drive, even if they’re using it in the same PC. If I do, I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

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