Picked up a 500GB EVO during a black Friday sale.  Here is what I want to do.

 

 

1) Move P3D to the new 500 Gig SSD.

2) Move the C drive / Windows 7 to my current P3D ssd - a 250 GB EVO.

 

 

Here is the plan.

 

Using Acronis, clone the current P3D drive (drive P:).

Copy to the new 500 GB drive.

Rename the old P3D drive Q:

Rename the new P3D drive P:  

 

- So at this point I am hoping I have moved P3D and everything is working as before.

 

 

Next step.

 

Clone C Drive onto the SSD drive Q:

Rename the old C drive on my HDD to another letter.

Set the new SSD clone with windows to the boot drive.

Rename it C:

 

 

I think this will work but want to double check with you guys.

I used the almost same approach with my previous computer. It worked fine. One thing to worry about though, when changing drive letters. You can't change the OS boot drive's letter that way. After cloning the system drive, you need to go into your CMOS setup and change the boot drive. Windows will automatically designate it as C:. Make sure you Google "cloning the system drive" and read about the pitfalls before doing that. 

 

The other issue with drive letters is that if you used a drive letter in the past and no longer have it assigned to a device, Windows is sorta dumb and may still have it designated in the registry as being used. How to restore missing drive letters to the available list in the Disk Management console here:

 

https://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmanager/drive-letter-is-missing-in-windows.html#drive-letter-list

 

Chances are you won't need to do that, as you should enough drive letters available for use after cloning. I would also suggest that you clone the P3d stuff first and make sure that everything is working correctly for a bit before you clone the system drive. 

Great info, thanks Jay.  I have watched a few videos about how to clone the C: drive so I should be ok there.

I'm so happy to see this topic, as I am in the same boat myself. After being on the fence for a while about switching over to SSD drives for the OS and P3D, I decided to take advantage of the recent Black Friday sale on Amazon to buy 2 500 gb Evos as the price was finally right for me!

 

I was considering getting just one 1tb drive (for about $250 vs $260 for the 2 separate 500 gb SSDs) but I was concerned about having both P3D and the OS on the same drive. I figured that the main reason everyone had said the two should be on separate drives is a result of the older mechanical platter drives and fragmentation, but I was curious to know if its ok to install the OS and p3d on the same SSD drive. I don't regret my decision to get 2 separate drives (just incase of drive failure, though the odds are probably very low for that to occur), I guess I am just curious at this point.

There is a free version of Macrium Reflect, and the great thing about this is that it allows one to move one drive to another even if the drive size is different. Many programs lack this feature.

 

Best wishes.

I have successfully transferred P3D to the new drive.  I just did a disk image (Acronis) and then renamed the drives.  There are no issues that I have seen.  Now I just need to move the OS which at least has the advantage of lots of instruction videos on YouTube.  Probably will do that this weekend.