I was mainly looking at the 850 because I am more of a fan of the AC franchise, but I guess thats only a $30 difference, and probably the price in the next Steam Summer sale or later, I can wait a while, still playing 3/4.
So why do you say I don't need it specifically? I know either way its a improvement, a big one at that. And what does the laptop kit enable? I see it on Samsungs page, at least under UK, but dosen't say what it is. Just shows the SSD. So there is a way to connect the SSD to the laptop to move data before installing it?
Last note, what do you mean by keep it connected? Keep the battery connected?
Hmm hear fresh install is better. How much more complicated is it? Do I loose anything? I think I might prefer keeping my install if I can without too many risk.
Whats the purpose of doing that? Just wondering? It will be a 256gb is what I'm betting on, so I think thats enough space.
Yeah your not making much sense. :P At least after the first sentence. I thought about Linux a little bit, maybe Ubuntu or the new Quantum OS. But I think I'll stick for Windows now, maybe atleast VMWare or dual boot in the future.
From my standpoint I'm more than a little grossed out by the Samsung software mentioned above, as I have little doubt it doesn't ship with a nasty and needless EULA, and given it's purpose would be more than apt for data collection (watch out for how large the executive is). DD ships with #!, and if you're icked-out by the above then I could tell you how to copy your drives without risking losing your data.
All you need to do it is a flash drive,
the #! install image,
Rufus (a USB imager), your two disks (old HDD and your new SSD), and of course a drive enclosure unless you have a spare SATA port in your laptop (doubtful, even larger ones with CD drives have the optical on eSATA).
Below I ended up writing a start-to-finish how-to on how to do what I was describing, requiring only basic computer knowledge and an open mind. Not originally what I intended, but if you want to save a bit of time (it looks longer than it is, trust me), I do insist you take this route if you're game.
The first thing you want to do is boot up your computer and start Rufus. In Rufus, you want to change the dropdown box to
ISO Image and select the #! ISO file. If it isn't already set to it, change the partition scheme to the one that says "MBR scheme for BIOS computers", check Quick Format because why waste time, and hit start.
Once it's finished imaging the flash drive, power off your computer, plug in your freshly imaged USB stick (the BIOS should support booting via USB 3.0 if they're on your computer, so don't worry about that), and during the boot sequence you need to hit your boot selection key. Depending on your BIOS type it could be a number of keys, but generally if you try Delete, Esc, Insert, and all of your F-keys (1 through 12) one of those is bound to work. If you end up having to trial and error which one it is, one of those keys may put you into your BIOS setup, which you don't need and should just reboot out of and continue. Once you have your boot selection menu up, select your USB install media (should be the only one there), and watch Linux boot. After it's done, on the menu that pops up select "Live Session" with the keyboard. #! will start up, and once it's done you can plug in your 2.5" disk enclosure into another USB port and wait for it to automatically mount the drive.
After that, you're going to want to right-click on the desktop for the applications menu, go down to the "System" submenu, and click on "gparted". Gparted is a Linux-based partition manager, but we won't be doing any copying or anything with it. Don't worry if you accidentally click something, as it asks for a commit to write changes before it does anything. In Gparted, there should be a dropdown menu in the top right corner, that should say something like
/dev/sda or similar. Open that up and there should be two others underneath it - one of them is your old HDD and one of them is your new SSD. To find out which one is your old one, look at the information displayed in the main area and the one that says "boot" in the far right corner will be your Windows partition. Read the
/dev/sdx parts of each one and remember which is which, as you'll need them when we get into DD. Before we exit out of Gparted you're going to want to right-click on each partition on the drives and click
Unmount, which will prevent conflicts with Thunar or other processes that we shouldn't need to worry about.
Important: Do not note the ones with numbers at the end of them - those are the partitions and will not copy the partition tables and bootloaders and stuff you need for a true clone, and will break the process of copying your drives!
Now that you've got those two names, you'll want to exit out of Gparted, open up your applications menu again, and select "Run Program" from the very top. In the box that pops up you want to type
gksu terminator verbatim and hit enter - what this does is it opens up a shell as root so we don't have to worry about privilege errors and sudos and the like. Now that you're in the command line, this is the most critical part of the process: at the terminal, with
<old drive> and
<new drive> representing those
/dev/... phrases you noted earlier (should look something like
/dev/sdb or
/dev/sdc, type
dd if=<old drive> of=<new drive> bs=4096; sync
and hit enter. Now it is copying your drive's data over. DD won't show progress bars or anything, but it
will let you know when it's done and could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours depending on how strong your processor is. Also, don't fret if you accidentally cancel it or mess up the process in any way - if you stop the process mid-copy all you have to do is execute the DD command over again same as before (your old drive, OS, files and such
will not be lost).
Once DD says it's done, it should spit out some block information and some other junk that you can ignore, and at this point you can now safely shut down your PC, switch out the hard drives putting the SSD into the internal slot, and you're done! The end result should be the exact same computer you had before but with SSD speeds. I hope I helped :)
