So right now I have two HDD's. One is a 1TB drive and the other is 2TB. Which is where P3D V4 is installed. I want to switch the 2TB drive with an SSD of the same size. How easy is it to switch the drive and can I copy everything as it is so I don't have to reinstall P3D and all the addons? Also can I do it without having to reinstall Win 10 either.

 

Thanks

If the SSD is at least as large as the HDD, you can clone the HDD to the SSD, which is a fast way to transfer the data.  I use my backup software (OO Diskimage) for that task.

If the SSD is smaller, some of the cloning software may still be able to shrink the partition to make it fit.

Assuming the 2TB drive is *not* your boot drive, as a last resort you can go brute-force and do a mass file copy from the HDD to the SSD, which wil take a long time.

After cloning the drive, swap the drive letters out so that the SSD has the same drive letter as the former HDD, and you should be good to go.  I also use a utility to give the new drive the same volume ID and name as the old one...not sure if many programs key on that any more, but old habits die hard.

 

16 minutes ago, w6kd said:

If the SSD is at least as large as the HDD, you can clone the HDD to the SSD, which is a fast way to transfer the data.  I use my backup software (OO Diskimage) for that task.

If the SSD is smaller, some of the cloning software may still be able to shrink the partition to make it fit.

Assuming the 2TB drive is *not* your boot drive, as a last resort you can go brute-force and do a mass file copy from the HDD to the SSD, which wil take a long time.

After cloning the drive, swap the drive letters out so that the SSD has the same drive letter as the former HDD, and you should be good to go.  I also use a utility to give the new drive the same volume ID and name as the old one...not sure if many programs key on that any more, but old habits die hard.

 

Thanks. Can I get an external USB bay that I can plug the SSD into so I can clone to it? Also what is the best cloning program that's easy to use?

12 hours ago, jt233 said:

Thanks. Can I get an external USB bay that I can plug the SSD into so I can clone to it? Also what is the best cloning program that's easy to use?

I wouldn't buy a USB dock for an SSD just for this.  If you can't mount the SSD into the PC together with the HDD, then I'd just open up the case, cable it up to a SATA port and let it hang loose in the case during the transfer.  As I mentioned above, I use OO DIskimage for the disk cloning.  Some SSDs actually come with, or have a cloning program available on their support site.

17 hours ago, w6kd said:

I wouldn't buy a USB dock for an SSD just for this.  If you can't mount the SSD into the PC together with the HDD, then I'd just open up the case, cable it up to a SATA port and let it hang loose in the case during the transfer.  As I mentioned above, I use OO DIskimage for the disk cloning.  Some SSDs actually come with, or have a cloning program available on their support site.

Very Helpful Thanks. However, I have one last quick question.

How reliable is cloning the drive? For example will I possibly have to reinstall any addons or anything like that or does everything usually work smoothly? The reason I'm asking is because I recently had to do a complete reinstall of P3D and all my addons and don't want to have to go through the process again of installing a bunch of my stuff.

Thanks again.

 

 

Edited November 19, 20205 yr by jt233

If you clone the drive and reassign drive letters so that the new drive has the same drive letter as the original one, it's pretty bulletproof.  There might be a small handful of programs that would fail a DRM check because the installation drive changed, but those would be the rare outliers.