Timeline to trasfer OS to new ssd hardrive?

Hey guys I finally bought a Samsung 250gig ssd and I was wondering
how long it takes to transfer windows 7 from the old drive to the new drive.
I have a few scheduling conflicts and i would like a general idea of what
kind of timeline that I'm looking at. This is the new drive 250GB Samsung 840 Series.
I would liked to have gotten the pro version but I couldn't justify the extra $50


Thanks

The actual migration does not take more than 45 mins. It's the preparation that's a little more time consuming. Mainly shrinking your HDD to fit into your new SSD. Your current partition has to be smaller than your SSD

Quote from sulphur18 : Hey guys I finally bought a Samsung 250gig ssd and I was wondering how long it takes to transfer windows 7 from the old drive to the new drive. I have a few scheduling conflicts and i would like a general idea of what kind of timeline that I'm looking at. This is the new drive 250GB Samsung 840 Series. I would liked to have gotten the pro version but I couldn't justify the extra $50 Thanks

Here's the guide I use.

http://www.howtogeek.com/97242/ho...ate-drive/

I'm actually cloning a 500GB HDD to a 120GB SSD for a friend right now. I started with that howtogeek guide, but switched to using this one: How to clone HDD to SSD with Windows 7′s own software [ssdfreaks.com]. People asked (and answered) most of the questions that I had in the comments.

This is my first time attempting this and the laptop had a recovery partition which isn't really covered in the articles that I found. I spent like 6 hours yesterday on it and gave up, and slept on it, then figured out a solution today. The external HDD that I'm using for the image is slow so that is contributing to the long wait time. Most of the time I was just sitting around waiting for data to move/copy.

There were a few unmovable files on the HDD that were preventing me from shrinking the partition small enough to fit onto the SSD so I had to disable hibernation, system protection, pagefile, etc and run defraggler in safe mode. I ended up with a drive with a 100MB system partition, a 46GB Main partition followed by a bunch of allocated space from shrinking the Main partition, then a system recovery partition at the end of the drive. It was unclear to me whether the Windows Backup tool would include the system partition since the documentation said it only included whatever is needed to boot the OS. Apparently it does include the system partition since when I tried to restore the backup to the SSD, it failed saying it wouldn't fit. I had to use Easus Partition Manager to Move the system partition in front of the allocated space so that the image wouldn't include the unallocated space between the partitions.

The time it will take depends on the configuration of your HDD, the speed of your devices, your familiarity, with the steps of the process, etc.

Thanks for the info guys. I was under the impression that I would be able to
migrate what I wanted and leave the rest on the soon to be secondary drive.
So it looks like I have some work ahead of me before I can start the process.

I may have to get another drive to transfer some of my valuable junk to another location.
I have a 1tb drive that is almost full and I'm not sure I can get that down to the 250gig
target.

Don't try to shrink a Terabyte!
Do not clone!


Here is what you do...

1. Update SSD firmware

2. CLEAN INSTALL WINDOWS on that SSD (Only drive).....
Add back other drives...

3. Then point your Libraries over to existing hard drive and set as default save location.

4. Install all programs on SSD put all games/steam on SSD

5. Move SWAP file to HDD


This way you can leisurely take your time deciding what you need on what drive.

My recommendation is...

On SSD the OS and PROGRAMS/GAMES

DATA goes/stays on your regular HDD.
Backups go on a regular HDD. (Along with offsite physical read-only media)

SSDS are fast but DO NOT TRUST THEM WITH DATA!

Done the correct way. Less than an Hour.

Always clean install the OS on an SSD saves all sorts of headaches.