Maximum PC

My roommate had recently bought a new SSD for his desktop and would like to replace his current boot drive with this new SSD. What would be the safest and most effective way of performing this?

Best option IMO, is a fresh OS install on the new SSD, then copy over any data you wish to keep from the old drive. A new/fresh install typically goes MUCH faster on an SSD. My relatively recent upgrade to SSD's took about 12 minutes from start of the fresh OS install to using Windows 7.

An alternative is using something like Acronis True Image to clone the old drive to the SSD as long as the old drive is of the same or lower capacity, but there are some problems with this. Assuming he's going from HDD to SSD: Files on HDD's tend to get fragmented & the drive needs to be defragmented on occasion, while SSD's should never be run through defragmentation. You could defrag the HDD first, then clone the drive, but that's just one potential problem, another is corrupted files... then there's unwanted files & programs, and finally HDD performance issues can be transfered over through cloning or at least they could with older version of Acronis True Image. Since improved performance is a primary factor for many people moving up to SSD's, that's not a good thing.

Definitely perform a clean install of Windows 7 on the SSD instead of cloning the HDD to the SSD. When you do, make sure the original HDD is disconnected from the motherboard. Also, ensure that your motherboard's BIOS is updated to the latest revision and that the SSD's firmware is updated to its latest revision as well, and make sure that your SATA ports are set to run in AHCI mode, not RAID or SATA (also known as IDE or Legacy in some motherboard BIOS settings). For other considerations in installling an SSD drive, see this link: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum ... -ABC-Guide

Well... I have an SSD from Samsung, it came with a migration kit. So I guess it depends if you were lucky enough to get such a thing.

I guess I forgot to add this tidbit(was tired and burnt out from homework): my roommate is going from a smaller capacity SSD to a larger capacity SSD, and he is not liking the idea of a clean install....

If your SSD didn't come with a migration kit, I'm sure there's a few kits you can buy.

You can also try Norton Ghost if you wanna pay a few bucks for it, but honestly, with an SSD you might as well do clean install, it will be super fast and clean up a bunch of shit you dont need, then you can transfer over any files you have on the old SSD. You might need eSATA or SATA-USB in order to transfer your old data.

If there's only one thing you really need to transfer, aside from programs, in order to ease the transition process it's your user folder. The only catch is you have to have the same user name (at least, I believe you do)

You don't need a kit. Though I too strongly recommend a clean install. If he is not going to do that fine.

Download the free Norton Ghost (NG) (probably special edition) from Samsung (see video too, according to it you already have NG) and with both drives in the PC, boot up from the NG CD (ISO file). Transfer an HDD image over to the SSD. Shut down. Disconnect the HDD temporarily from the data and power connection. Boot up the SSD and make sure everything is going well. Then at some point--I'd wait at least a week to make sure the SSD is working--wipe the HDD and use as a secondary drive (might want to clone an image of the drive if he has a backup drive before doing any of this.

As someone mentioned you can do this with Acronis (trial) or Macrium Reflect free (my preferred) installed on the boot drive and many more drive image makers that have intelligent sector imaging.

Samsung's transfer kit was Norton Ghost and a USB to SATA adapter.