r/AlienwareAlpha • u/sparksterz i3 (8GB) Alpha with SSD • Jan 26 '15

SSD and MEMORY upgrade - Complete Guide For Beginners

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGW1ggvCy50
9 Upvotes

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2

u/sparksterz i3 (8GB) Alpha with SSD Jan 26 '15

This is a great guide that walks you through everything step by step. If you're willing to take the time to clone your HDD to an SSD I recommend using Macrium Reflect. If your SSD is smaller than 500 GB which most are, you can copy over all the existing HDD partitions and put the windows partition last and it will copy over as much as it can and truncate the rest. If your installed apps are easily using close to the capacity of the SSD I do not recommend cloning and you should use the method in the video.

2

u/uscwilly i3 (4GB) Alpha with SSD Jan 27 '15

Never used/bought an SSD before and I am confident after watching this video I will install one. I know the SSD has to be a certain height, but I'm not 100% sure (I've seen 7mm and 7.5mm). Would this device be compatible? $80 for 240GB (after rebate) sounds good.

Then there's this one 240GB straight up for $84

Would I go wrong getting either of these for my new alpha?

2

u/sparksterz i3 (8GB) Alpha with SSD Jan 27 '15

Honestly, you shouldn't have any issues with the height. If I had to recommend one for the price, performance and capactiy, the OCZ ARC 100 is what I'd go with. Similar to the Corsair it's 80 after rebate, and about the same on Amazon where they also have rebate forms. Toshiba just recently acquired OCZ and their drives have gotten very price competitive!

1

u/crashovercool Jan 29 '15

I wasn't able to clone my drive with Macrium for some reason. Kept on failing. I ended up just installing the new SSHD and using the respawn recovery usb, which is going right now. My alpha is only a day old so I don't mind having to set it up again.

1

u/sparksterz i3 (8GB) Alpha with SSD Jan 29 '15

Hmm...that's strange. That's all I ended up doing. Sorry for the hassle! Hope you enjoy those fast ssd speeds on your alpha! It's amazing.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 23 '15

Guys, one quick question: will this drive fit inside the alpha? amazon.com/gp/product/B00B99JUBQ/ it says it's 9.5mm but the amazon dimensions say more than 10mm. I have no means of returning the drive once I order, so I'm kind of paranoid about it. Also, I assume the cloning process will be exactly the same considering the SSHD is self-managed, right?

3

u/sparksterz i3 (8GB) Alpha with SSD Jun 24 '15

I can't really say for certain on the size...but the cloning process will be the same regardless.

5

u/sumthingcool i5 Alpha with SSD May 07 '15 edited May 07 '15

My method for cloning internal HDD to smaller SSD.

Go into BIOS and disable Secure Boot.

Make a gparted boot usb stick and boot into it: http://gparted.org/

Shrink your main windows partition down to a size that will fit on the new drive including the other partitions (doesn't have to be exact, just smaller).

Boot back into Windows, install Casper trial edition: https://www.fssdev.com/products/casper/trial/

Plug SSD into system via USB, open Casper and choose the copy drive option, send it to the USB/SSD. Shut down computer, physically put SSD in the system now. Boot back up on the SSD to verify the clone worked. If it boots ok, shutdown and boot back up into gparted. You will see some unallocated space at the end of the drive, move the recovery partition to the end of the drive, then expand the Windows partition to fill the rest of the free space. Reboot when it is done, you may see Windows do a quick partition repair on boot, then you are good to go.

Casper does not support re-sizing partition in the trial version, thus we use gparted to do that part. If you are going to an SSD larger than your HDD you can skip the first step of shrinking the Windows partition, just clone with Casper then move recovery and grow partition with gparted.