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heyyahblah
join:2009-02-01
Mississauga, ON

heyyahblah

Member

[hard drive] Laptop HDD to SDD Fix? Help?

Hey guys, my sis came to visit but shes only here for a couple of days, then leaving again overseas. Anyway she has a laptop thats about 2 1/2 years old.

Asus K53E-A1 15.6" - Core i3 2310M (2nd gen) - Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit - 4 GB RAM - 500 GB HD
»support.asus.com/downloa ··· SAQYMnvO

Anyways, situation is she is a heavy user and dependent on it constantly with all sorts of heavy applications, ram usage is always high, and its a bit sluggish and I know its because its loaded with crap. Also sometimes it works normally and other times its very slow to respond. I think the HDD is ticking. She doesn't want to format (factory restore) and re-install all apps. I do that, but might not have enough time.

So I made a suggestion of replacing the HDD with an SSD into this machine, and it will significantly speed up the computer and probably add to the lifetime of the usage. Also, I'm pretty sure if she replaces it in a year or so, would be able to take out the SSD and install in newer laptop and make it run just as fast if not even faster .... (ie. SATA II vs SATA III). She gave me a budget and we were looking at these 3 drives so I need your guys' expertise in here on 3 things, please and thank you.

1. She wanted to keep the original size of 500GB, so we have decided on a size of the SSD. Now, on our budget are these SSD's good quality yes or no? And if so which one of these 3 would be most recommended to get

Crucial MX100 512GB 6Gb/s Solid State Drive (SSD), Read: 550MB/s Write:500MB/s (CT512MX100SSD1)
»www.canadacomputers.com/ ··· d=073211

ADATA SX900 512GB 2.5" 6Gb/s Solid State Drive (SSD), Read: 540MB/s Write: 465MB/s (ASX900S3-512GM-C)
»www.canadacomputers.com/ ··· d=047474

Samsung 840 EVO 500GB 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drive (MZ-7TE500BW) Read: 540MB/s Write: 520MB/s
»www.canadacomputers.com/ ··· d=062500

All 3 drives are the same price-ish and same size with similar rates. Out of these 3 drives, which is best or are they all low-end and not recommended?

2. Can I do a drive copy aka CLONE HDD/CLONE IMAGE of the current HDD to SSD? I have a desktop that i can plug both the 2.5" laptop HDD and the new SSD via SATA. Now on that desktop would I be able to load some type of cloning software ie. Acronis True Image 2014 and make a clone of the HDD to the SSD. Then put the SSD into the laptop and it will boot and function normally like it did, just with x3 times the speed? Or will this corrupt windows and mess up the computer?

If this will take care of the speed issues and I can just clone the drive and put it back into the laptop this will make her happy and go on with our Merry way.

ie. I'd like to note that the current drive is partitioned, but on the D:\ it just says data and its empty. I do not see a recovery partition in there. Which is strange it is just empty.

Roughly I see like C:\ says 348GB and D:\ says 90GB so I am assuming that is the full 500GB drive. I am ruffing the numbers here, but D:\ is empty even with 'show hidden folders' checked.

So do I delete this partition and merge it with C:\? Or Just leave it? And can I make a perfect clone without BSOD's and errors.

3. And lastly ... since the 500GB HDD will be coming out, can I just buy a USB 2.0 enclosure for $10 from CC and slap that drive in there? Then make that a regular 'backup external drive' for her for $10? She can save her crap on the new external I will make with the case and use the SSD in her laptop for hispeeds.

Hope you guys can reply asap as my time is limited, thanks for help again as usual. If I missed something, post and let me know asap.

Thank You.
Chrno
join:2003-12-11

1 recommendation

Chrno

Member

1. The Crucial is not a bad drive and it comes with an activation key for Acronis which you can download and clone the data over to the SSD. However, some people have ran into issues with this drive randomly disappearing during cold boot and in the middle of use (BSoD). I don't have experience with the drive personally but have sold it to many customers without problems or they haven't reported any to me. ADATA, not sure about this one, no experience with it at all. The Samsung drive would be another good choice. Just make sure to update the drive firmware with the Performance Restoration Tool found here before loading data: »www.samsung.com/global/b ··· ads.html The Samsung drive also comes with data migration software which will help you clone data over. If it's not found within the SSD packaging, you may download it here: »www.samsung.com/global/b ··· r11.html Other than the performance degradation issue with the drive, the Samsung is relatively reliable.

2. You should be able to clone the OS and data over and have it boot without issues. ASUS likes to partition their factory installs. They generally have the drive partitioned as follows for Win7 installs (2 variations):
Recovery Partition | System Partition | OS partition | Data partition
or
System partition | OS partition | Data partition | Recovery partition
. They started using the 2nd variation during the few months prior to the Win8 release and the disk is gpt. If your disk is formatted in the 2nd variation, you may run into problems with the recovery hotkey not working (F9 during boot) after you clone the data over. You can check the partition layout in disk management (right click Computer and select Manage). If the Data partition is empty, you can delete it and extend the OS partition. You can do this with diskpart or disk management.

3. Yes, you can put the drive in an enclosure and use it as backup. I would recommend performing a zero write to the drive AFTER you have verified that the cloned data on the SSD works on the laptop to verify the drive is good to be used as a backup device. Would be some what pointless if there's some type of defect with the HDD

heyyahblah
join:2009-02-01
Mississauga, ON

heyyahblah

Member

Hey sir,

Thank you very much for the reply. Sounds like I might go and give the Samsung Drive a try since it comes with firmware update tools and the data migration software free of charge, I like that. You mentioned the performance degradation issue, now is that a constant problem or will it be fixed when I update the firmware. I would plan to do it as you said. Plug the drive into the desktop PC and run the restore tool to update firmware and scan the drive. After that process would complete I would continue to load the software and clone the SSD.

Thank you very much for the links, was kind of you to research it ahead of time for me. Appreciated.

2. The computer model is an older model from 2011 which did not even include SP1 of the Windows 7 install. So I am hopefully assuming the partition is like in the 1st way you mentioned:

Recovery || System Part || OS Part || Data Part

Anyways, I will double check in Disk Management and check out the layout and hopefully if it its like you said I will just delete and merge the data part, since its an empty 90GB D:\ DRIVE.

3. Thank you for the answer with that. Can I use the free-version of CCLEANER do to the zero-write to the HDD if its in working order and not defective before I put it inside the enclosure, and does it matter how many passes I use? 1 Pass, 3 Pass on the HDD or it makes no difference?

Thank you so much for your informative & helpful post. It helped me a lot.



edit: is there a freeware HDD Benchmarking Software tool, or S.M.A.R.T. status tool to check the life of the current HDD,

and also on my desktop I have Perfect Disk Home v13 for my regular drives, can I install that on her SSD or is it not recommended to defrag SSD's and not to bother with perfect disk software?

thanks again.
Chrno
join:2003-12-11

1 recommendation

Chrno

Member

According to Samsung, the performance issue was resolved with the firmware update that's part of the Performance Restoration tool. I am unable to tell you how accurate this information is as I don't own the drive personally. However, you should run the tool regardless if that's what they claim. I found running the DOS version of the tool to be faster if your drive is empty. The Windows version takes a while to complete the process.

2. If the system did not come with Win7SP1 then it will be 1st variation layout.

3. The drive is most likely a Seagate 500GB. If it is a Seagate drive I would just download Seatools and zero the drive with it. You don't need multipass erase. Just a single pass should be fine as you just want to make sure the integrity of the drive is good before you relegate it to backup duties. For SMART, you can use the trial version of HDTune or free version of CrystalDiskInfo. SSDs do not require defrag.

heyyahblah
join:2009-02-01
Mississauga, ON

heyyahblah

Member

1. Awesome, thanks for that great bit of information. I will run the tool for sure like you said. I will try the DOS version, sounds good and thank you for the heads up.

2. Great to hear it is 1st variation layout

3. I checked, actually the drive is a WD 500GB, surprising eh? So I guess I have to get the WD tools software and see if WD has tools that will zero the drive for me. I will also check the integrity before I get an enclosure.

I got the Samsung EVO since its $40 off $290 to $250. So I'm gonna update the firmware on it and then run their data migration software tool and go from there. I am defragging the laptop as we speak so its not fragmented. Probably won't finish tonight since its so late but yea, will get a head start.

Thanks man for all your help.


heyyahblah

1 edit

heyyahblah

Member

Hey Chrno,

Thanks for all the help. I installed the Samsung tools, ran the performance restoration tool, samsung magician said the firmware was up to date and I was good to go. I used the data migration software and it took about 1hr 34min to clone the HDD onto the SSD partitions, boot, recovery and all. Completed without a hitch.

The actual drive inside the ASUS was a WD Scorpio Blue 500GB. You were correct also about the layout it was type 1 layout with drive being MBR and not GPT. After the clone I popped in the SSD and wow is all I can say.

Aside from all the junk she has on there it loads up super quick. I didn't actually time it but it seems like 30 seconds for full boot, compared to the 3+ minutes on the regular hard drive. I didn't get to play around much as it got late when I finished everything. So I packed up for the night.

Tomorrow I will install the samsung tools on the laptop, optimize the ssd, get rid of all the junk software and help improve the boot-time and clean up the computer a bit. There is so much useless junk on it. All her add-on software + laptop preloaded bloatware added to it.

Debating of adding another 4GB stick of DDR3 since Kingston DDR3 4GB 1066MHz is on sale for $30 right now. 1 DIMM slot free on the laptop. Never hurts to have a little extra ram.

Thanks for all your help. Personally myself I would format a fresh SSD O/S for personal use, but I'm glad to hear that cloning the drive is also possible.

Only thing that is a shame that there are 3 versions of this type of EVO SSD, lol. There is the "regular" that I purchased, the "desktop version" and the "laptop version"

The difference between the 3? Well the laptop and desktop upgrade EVO include a USB to SATA/SATA POWER adapter so you plug into any laptop or desktop USB port and migrate the software, swap drives and be on your merry way. Desktop bonus version includes a 3.5" to 2.5" bracket to install in cases that do not have a SSD ready 2.5" bay. If I didn't have a Desktop PC accessible on hand with 2 extra SATA cables and free SATA POWER connectors on my PSU I would not be able to accomplish this feat as this is how I had to hook up the drives in order to clone them.

This is the cable that the standard EVO did not include ... unless you buy the desktop upgrade version or laptop upgrade version ... so beware ...




How I had to clone the drives without that included cable ....







So ... user beware ... if you are going to be cloning an SSD make sure you purchase a USB to SATA/SATA POWER cable to migrate the drives, otherwise you will need a spare computer (desktop) with some extra cables and run a setup like I did above.

Thanks again!
Chrno
join:2003-12-11

Chrno

Member

Thanks for the update. Glad everything worked out for you.

heyyahblah
join:2009-02-01
Mississauga, ON

heyyahblah

Member

I am thankful for your quick help and prompt replies for me to get this feat completed in 2 days. It was greatly appreciated.

You have yourself a Merry Christmas and/or Happy Holidays!!
(whichever you celebrate)