Transforming Your Windows 10 Boot Drive with an SSD Upgrade
A Few Thoughts Before You Dive In
Prep Your SSD
Clone Your Current Drive
And here’s a heads-up: you can also utilize the built-in Windows Backup and Restore, but if you’re a command-line fan, get comfy with diskpart for setting up, although it’s generally not necessary for the cloning itself:
diskpart
list disk
select disk X
clean
convert gpt
create partition primary
format fs=ntfs quick
assign
exitPop That SSD Into Your PC
Boot from the SSD—Here Comes the BIOS Dance
F2, F12, Delete, or Esc as soon as the machine’s waking up). Check out the Boot Order menu—this is where you’ll tell your system where to look first for a boot drive.
You want your new SSD at the top of that list. Sometimes it’s listed as “Samsung SSD” or something similar. If you’ve gone the NVMe route, make sure UEFI mode’s turned on and it’s showing up properly in the settings—or else it might throw a fit.
Reboot and Validate—Time to Celebrate!
Once in, check with Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc) to confirm that it’s indeed running off the SSD. Look under the Performance tab—if your SSD model shows up, you’re golden. There’s a command you can use, too, for the curious types: wmic diskdrive get model, deviceID, serialNumber /format:csv lets you check some techy details.
If everything looks good, maybe run Optimize Drives to fix up any potential issues, or you could test TRIM support with fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify. Response should read DisableDeleteNotify = 0, which is what you want—TRIM is a must for SSD longevity.