Question Time for a new M.2, but its my C drive and no other M.2 slots

[mikeford]

Win10 pro is installed on my M.2 C drive. Idea was just put the bare minimum on it to keep it clean and last a long time, so its 237GB formatted, with 12GB currently free, time for a new M.2.

I plan to drive down to Microcenter in the morning buy whichever M.2 that looks best for under $100, that is the easy part.

How do I clone the old C drive to the new M.2, swap the new M.2 into the system without messing up my Win10 install. I recall some issue maybe 3 years ago after a hardware update that ended up taking hours, and several calls to MS to sort out, zero desire to repeat that.

Any suggestions?

B450 motherboard, one M.2 slot, lots of hard drives and space on them, 2TB USB external drive, some M.2 pci adapters, but no handy spare slots or experience using them.

 

[VirtualLarry]

First of all, I wouldn't go with anything smaller than 2TB NVMe, budget permitting. ($144 for the Kingston 2TB NV1 on Adorama.)

Second, I would get Macrium working, to image the existing M.2 drive to your external HDD. Then install the new M.2 NVMe in place of the original, boot off of your Macrium USB rescue disk, and then restore from the image file to the new M.2 drive.

 

[mikeford]

I have about 14TB of HDD in this system right now. I hope to cut that down as I sort old files and move things to NAS, but for the SSD, especially the M.2 I have no plans to put much on it besides the OS, and a few files where its pesky to locate on other drives. The M.2 upgrade is almost entirely due to one game, Path of Exile, which has a 44GB content file that creates almost 30 seconds of lag when moving between areas in the game.

That is why I was thinking 512GB, and I remain convinced that will be plenty for the remaining life of this 3 year old system, but its cheap enough to go to 1TB, so I did.

Macrium made a backup of the C drive with no big issue but the 2 hrs to do it, but so far refuses to make a rescue disc on this ext USB HDD. I will be attempting more this morning with a 32GB thumb drive.