Moving Hard Drive to SSD

[MrKJLS]

Hi everyone,

 

Next week I will be moving my Windows Server Install from the hard drive what's already in my server to a nice new 240GB SSD. Anyone got any guides or tips to doing this.

 

BTW this is a personal server I'm doing this to. Also I apologize for the poor grammar and spelling. [emoji4]

[dhicks]

Next week I will be moving my Windows Server Install from the hard drive what's already in my server to a nice new 240GB SSD. Anyone got any guides or tips to doing this.

 

I've transferred a number of system over to SSD over the past few years, and I've pretty much always used Acronis True Image, a copy of which comes free with SSDs from Crucial. You simply connect up the new SSD, set the software off to do its thing, wait an hour or two while the data gets copied accross, then switch the devices and boot the computer up again. I've never had any issues - I've not tried it with a server version of Windows, but I don't imagine there's any difference in the process. Acronis handles fiddling around with partition sizes and so on, there's very little you really need to do.

[MrKJLS]

I've transferred a number of system over to SSD over the past few years, and I've pretty much always used Acronis True Image, a copy of which comes free with SSDs from Crucial. You simply connect up the new SSD, set the software off to do its thing, wait an hour or two while the data gets copied accross, then switch the devices and boot the computer up again. I've never had any issues - I've not tried it with a server version of Windows, but I don't imagine there's any difference in the process. Acronis handles fiddling around with partition sizes and so on, there's very little you really need to do.

 

I know you said you haven't done this with a Server OS. Would you possibly know how this work with the RAID? I have the OS on a hard drive on it's own configured in a RAID 0 as the HP raid controller wouldn't let me pass through as a normal hard drive and I have my Storage in a RAID 10 array.

[dhicks]

I have the OS on a hard drive on it's own configured in a RAID 0 as the HP raid controller wouldn't let me pass through as a normal hard drive and I have my Storage in a RAID 10 array.

 

Hmm - that's an interesting one. Will the RAID controller see the SSD as a drop-in replacement for the original harddrive? Not sure how to check that one.

[MrKJLS]

Hmm - that's an interesting one. Will the RAID controller see the SSD as a drop-in replacement for the original harddrive? Not sure how to check that one.

 

I'm not sure. But I'm going to try backing up the OS with Veeam Endpoint Protection and restoring it back to the SSD.

 

The Server is a HP ML110 Gen7. I think the RAID controller is a HP B110i

 

I will update if it worked or not. Thanks for the help!

[Fazza]

Either image it, backup and restore it to the SSD or P2V it & install the OS from scratch with your old server virtualised.

[Duke5A]

You can try adding the SSD in its own RAID0 volume, boot the system with WinPE (or even Windows server setup of some flavor) that has drivers for the controller, open a command prompt (Shift-F10) at the first question prompt and run whatever cloning software you have to copy the volume over. I use Ghost32 and this process works all the time for me.

[mavhc]

I'd P2V it. But when moving to SSDs I use Paragon Disk Manager

[MrKJLS]

I would P2V if it wasn't a Hyper-V host as well. I will give the ghost and paragon way a go if the veeam way doesn't work.

[MrKJLS]

Welp, I've decided it's going to be quicker to rebuild it. The Boot Drive is ruined, it's soo slow. It's taken roughly 2 hours to install the endpoint client for Veeam.

 

Thanks for all your input guys!