From Hard Disk To SSD

Maybe this is something that I should have done a few months back. But then again, Solid State Drive (SSD) were very expensive then. My WinXP partition now boots up super fast in under 10 seconds after my upgrade to a SSD. Previously, it took about 2 minutes. It has been almost a month since I upgraded my PC internal hard disk drive (HDD) to a SSD. So far everything looks good. I would have loved getting a Samsung SSD with its reputation and reliability and all. But Samsung SSDs were way beyond my budget. In the end I settled for a Crucial 500GB MX500 2.5" drive by Micron. Not too bad at a price of RM293.

I wouldn't have migrated to an SSD if not for the ever increasing bad blocks at various partitions within my HDD over the last couple of months. One file even become inaccessible just a few weeks ago because of bad blocks. The HDD is still spinning and booting up alright but experience told me that the HDD is reaching its end of life.

Cloning

I used my backup software Aomei Backupper Standard version 4.6.3 (the free version) to do the migration. All I did was to attach my SSD to a 'SATA to USB' cable, plug this cable to a USB port on my computer and fire up Aomei Backupper. Then select Clone -> Disk Clone and finally wait, and wait ... for 2 hours.

The whole cloning process could have been a lot faster if I had a USB 3.0. But then this is a 9 year old computer that I have here. But on the whole, the process was relatively painless.

My 500GB HDD is about 60% utilised, by the way. I have 6 Windows partition in all. It's very reassuring to see the partitions mounted and popping-up after every successful cloning. As far as I can tell, all partitions appear to be intact with nothing missing.

I can't be sure if it was the limitations of Aomei Backupper or my failing hard disk (several bad blocks were reported in the log during cloning at, I think, the Ubuntu partition) but my Ubuntu partition failed in the migration process. Needless to say, my SSD failed in the initial boot, as there was no Grub boot-loader menu to be seen anywhere. A good opportunity to upgrade to the more recent LUbuntu here, which I did, and all operating systems booted up beautifully without any problems after that.

Oops

One quirkiness during the migration process though: Linux swap partition was marked as a FAT32 partition, which I eventually corrected using fdisk in LUbuntu. I have no idea why this happened.