Upgraded the SSD in my server yesterday. Finally got the M.2 mounting screws in the mail. Took off from work on Thursday and Friday. Decided this would be a fun afternoon project. The old drive was a Samsung 840. I didn't have much issues with that drive. It was not the 840 EVO drive that was affected with the performance degradation issue. But it only had 128GB of space. You'd think that would be fine for a computer only serving up files. But I'm using Windows 7. Windows 7 tends to bloat. If I was replacing the CPU and motherboard, then I'd upgrade to a newer OS. As it is, I don't feel like having to reconfigure everything.
The problem is that even though I had freed up some space, it wasn't enough to install Samsung Magician. I needed the Samsung NVMe driver for the newer, 960 Pro. I've had this thing since 2017. It was $300 for 512GB. But I never used it. Well, here is a need and I'm not using it for anything else. Like I said, I didn't have enough room to install Samsung Magician. I ended up uninstalling all programs except for anything vital (Microsoft, Intel). Left Plex alone, but deleted all my malware/spyware software. Finally, got enough space to install Samsung Magician. It recognized the 960 Pro and came up with the NVMe driver. That being done, I installed Samsung's Data Migration tool. After some rebooting, the software migrated all the data and partitions to the new drive in about 30 minutes. Disconnected the old drive and the computer now boots to the cloned drive. Success!