Well I just bit the bullet on a new 2TB MX500, seemed a good deal for £150inc. This will replace both my current 500gb MX300 (system drive) and 2TB Samsung Spinpoint (storage) which has started making noises! The question then, is should I go the whole hog and do a full fresh system install, or should I simply clone the system drive? I assume the days or seeing big performance gains from fresh installs died when SSDs came along? If I clone can anyone recommend some decent software? (preferably free!)
https://clonezilla.org/ I always used that to clone the whole disk, from smaller to bigger disk. Then boot into Windows and change partition size as I see fit. I only really re-install when I'm changing motherboard now. I had the same Windows from 2012 up to recently when I upgraded from i7 2700k.
I always prefer a fresh install. However, if you wish to install iiirc my MX500's came with a link to Acronis that you can use for free.
We cloned a smaller SSD to a larger one on my colleagues work machine, which was dual booting Linus and Windows, and it was a massive mess! The Moot manager didn't like it at all and I had to spend hours fixing it!
A fresh install is increasingly appealing. I have 120mb cable so it shouldn't really take long to replace any apps or games (probably quicker to download them than to store them!) Pretty much just need to backup key stuff from "My Documents" to a USB3 stick, or just backup the whole folder. All my music/tv/films/etc are on the storage drive, so could be moved across later.
Always a fresh install, keeps Windows at it's most optimal, rather than leaving aging files that are left over in the registry. At least nowadays, you can download the latest version of Windows and install that without the need of downloading big service packs and other updates failing to install properly.
When you clone, you must clone whole drive. Copying data or just cloning the partitions will cause problems. Clonezilla have never failed me. For fresh install, you can plug in your old drive afterwards and then drag the files across. Would be useful to make a copy of the whole User and ProgramData folders so you won’t discover you’ve missed anything afterwards. (Mainly Game save data)
I don't know if this is just anecdata but it seems that fresh installs of Windows are much less necessary than they used to be back in the good old days of XP - even 7 seemed to be pretty solid in terms of not degrading over time. XP was crap for it, of course, but more modern versions of Windows seem a lot more robust. Edit: Would say that if you've made significant hardware changes (i.e. motherboard) then I'd do a fresh install, but if it's just moving from one system drive to another then I'd clone clone clone.
