How would I upgrade to a SSD?

I want to upgrade to a SSD but I'm not sure whats the way I should do it. I have a 1tb hard drive thats almost full with all my games on it. There any way to upgrade to SSD without having to download all my games again?

I guess I would want a 256gb SSD. How would I upgrade to that?

"upgrade" by copy paste your games to it.

Leave your games on your HDD and copy your OS to your SSD. Samsung has a migration utility for their SSD's.

Fresh install of Windows on the SSD.

Then if they're steam games, you can just reinstall steam to that same location and Steam will check if you have those games installed when you try to install them on Steam.

So does it just copy my OS only to my hard drive, then it leaves my games and stuff on the big hard drive?

It does but I would recommend a fresh install of Windows when you go from HDD to SSD since Windows (7 and 8 only) configures itself for SSD optimization.

I might as well just redownload all my games. Be smooth sailing from there on.

You don't have to redownload all of them, depending what client u use.

For example Steam lets you back them up to another drive. Just remember to backup ur saves as well when they dont have cloud saving.

Yeah I'll probably buy another drive to back them up. How do you make sure your saves are there?

Depends on each game. Some have cloud saving, some don't.

Most of the times the local saves are stored in MY DOCUMENTS folder.

Sounds like a lot of crap to go through and pay so much money for a quicker boot time.

An SSD is not only for boot time (although my Windows 8 10 second boot time is nice), but also applications turn on much quicker, games load faster etc.

It all depends on budget and time of course. Only reason I went SSD is because I built a new PC from scratch.

That is the only reason I would. Yes it has all been re-hashed a dozen times, SSD's make your pc boot faster and apps load faster. In my opinion overrated on both accounts for how much money they are. If I were building a new system why not, but as a solo upgrade no way.

Well look at it from the other point of view. As a solo upgrade it's much cheaper than a whole new system, lol.

But yes, they are still expensive but coming down in price fast.

Only downside I see to SSDs so far is:

1- Price to Size value

2- Data recovery is not known since they are a new technology. If a HDD dies most of the time it's possible for data recovery labs to get some data off it. If an SSD dies, we don't know yet.

the load times in some of my games decreased by 200%. also, because of an SSD, i load the fastest in bf4 whenever a new map loads. i get to pick whatever vehicle i want at the start of the game and i am the first to get to any point. i can get in and out of games incredibly quickly.

You would want your OS on the SSD and keep your games on a HDD mainly because game load times haven't changed much so I wouldn't recommend a SSD for installing games on.

Clean install your OS on to the SSD

I went down the migration path and it literally didn't work.

I have a Samsung 840 250GB SSD and its ridiculously fast. Boots up my PC in less than 10 seconds and loads programs even faster than that. My SSD and IPS Ultrawide monitor are the best upgrades I have ever made. F*** HDD and F*** anything that isn't 21:9 :D.

I hear ya dude, they are cool to have....but is getting your first choice vehicle worth that cash? lol. I'm just not sold on these things yet, I'll stop there as at this point I hijacked the thread. Sorry op!

I don't care about choice of vehicles in BF4, but by the time everyone else has loaded I have already captured 2 points and on top of the table with points, lol.....

The fastest way would be to clone the drives. I got myself one of those USB3 to Sata/Sata Power adapters and with a software called EaseUS Todo Backup I was able to clone my laptops HDD to SSD.

Recommended option would be to do all your backups and install a fresh copy of Windows on the SSD, then once you're ready to use the SSD with backups restored, format the HDD and use it as storage.