SSD Migration and Troubleshooting

This page covers everything you might need to know about Solid State Disks.

Summary

Solid state disks (SSDs) have become much more affordable and can offer a considerable speed advantage over conventional magnetic hard disk drives (HDs). They can be highly reliable, in particular, they are very much more resilient to physical shocks than hard disks as they have no moving parts. Replacing the HD by an SSD can give a new lease of life to your computer by making typical use much faster.

Safety

Always ensure that the user's data is fully backed up before attempting a migration or any kind of investigation or repair. It is good practice in any case to regularly back up your data.

SSD Migration

In most instances, migrating from a hard disk (HD) to a solid state drive (SSD) will offer a substantial speed improvement. It is important though to check other issues that may affect performance; see how to deal with a slow laptop for Windows computers and how to speed a slow OS X computer for ones running OS X.

Installing an SSD is usually easy and with ensuring there's enough memory is usually easy to do. Migrating the operating system, if the original hard disk is still in good working condition, takes longer and adds some complexity.

Which SSD do you need?

You need to get an SSD of the right size and with the right interface (or with an adapter). You can usually find this information in the specifications for your computer or by looking at the installed hard drive. Most modern laptops, from 2006 onwards, need a 2.5" SATA SSD and desktops can accommodate a 3.5" SATA SSD. SATA is the name of the interface and specify the connector on the SSD that will connect to your computer. Older computers used mostly a PATA interface.

As 2.5" SATA SSDs are the most common ones, best if possible is to go for one of these and use an adapter if needed (you can obviously fit a smaller size SSD in a larger space). As for the capacity of the SSD, smaller is cheaper so it will depends on your usage and what you can afford. Several SSDs are sold with a five years warranty which can be used as a proxy for quality.

Older computers may support PATA disks requiring a SATA to PATA adapter, and very small laptops may only be able to fit an 1.8" disk with the mSATA interface (be careful that the mSATA interface is not the same as the μSATA one!).

This table shows options for SSDs depending on the interface of your computer and the size of the existing HD.

SSD options

	3.5"	2.5"	1.8"
SATA	(a) 2.5" SATA SSD with plastic holder	(b) 2.5" SATA SSD	(c) 1.8" mSATA SSD with an mSATA to SATA adapter
PATA	(d) 2.5" SATA SSD with plastic holder and PCI SATA card	(e) 1.8" mSATA SSD with an mSATA to 44-pin IDE/PATA (3 or 5 V) and possibly a 2.5" enclosure.	(f) 1.8" mSATA SSD with an mSATA to 40-pin 1.8" ZIF adapter

Before embarking on a migration, you should ensure your BIOS is up to date. As soon as you have installed your new SSD you should check the SSD manufacturer's website or the tools that come with the SSD for a utility to ensure you have the latest firmware.

Close-up of SATA connector

An mSATA SSD on top of a 2.5-inch SATA HD

(a) Upgrading from a 3.5" SATA HD (e.g., modern desktop)

Considering that 2.5" SATA SSDs are most common, best would be to for one of these and get an SSD Holder to make it fit without moving in the 3.5" space. The holder is a cheap bit of plastic that holds the SSD in place.

(b) Upgrading from a 2.5" SATA HD (e.g., modern laptop)

Most computers since 2006 have been sold with 2.5" SATA HD. To physically replace the HD with a 2.5" SATA SSD consists of simply taking out the HD and putting the SSD in. Usually the drive bay is accessible via a trap door so there's no need to open the computer and this is very easy to do.

(c) Upgrading from a 1.8" SATA HD (e.g., some recent laptops)

This is rare, but if this is your laptop, you'll need a 1.8" mSATA SSD and an mSATA to SATA adapter,

(d) Upgrading from a 3.5" PATA HD (e.g., old desktop PC)

As old desktop computers do not have any SATA sockets, so to use a SATA SSD, you need to install a SATA interface using a a PCI card. So you will need a 2.5" SATA SSD, a plastic holder so it fits in a 3.5" slot and a PCI SATA card.

(e) Upgrading from a 2.5" PATA HD (e.g., old laptop)

Different laptops use different voltage for their IDE/PATA interface so before getting a converter you need to figure out if your laptop requires 5 V as is most common, or 3 V as for example some IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad laptops (X40, X41, X41T). Do not get the wrong one or you risk to damage your SSD. So you will need a 1.8" mSATA SSD, an mSATA to 44-pin IDE/PATA (3 or 5 V), and for some laptops also a 2.5" enclosure.

(f) Upgrading from a 1.8" PATA HD (e.g, old small laptop)

This is rare case, but if this is your laptop, you'll need a 1.8" mSATA SSD and an mSATA to 40-pin 1.8" ZIF adapter.

In all cases, when switching the HD with an SSD, you usually need to transfer the four screw (two on each side) of the HD to the SSD that are there to hold the drive in place.

Starting from fresh or cloning

Swapping the hard disk with an solid state drive is an opportunity to consider how you use your computer and decide whether you want to stick with your current operating system installation (often Windows or OS X) and clone it to the new drive, reinstall the same operating system and copy your essential data or installing Linux. Another option is to set up a dual boot between the system you were using and Linux. SSDs often, but not always, come with tools to simplify the process.

Note that if you want to clone your HD or copy data from the HD to the SSD you will need to connect both to your computer simultaneously. To do this, assuming you get a SATA SSD, you need a SATA to USB adapter cable or a USB enclosure for SATA drives so one drive will be installed in the machine and the other will be connected to a USB port. You can then reuse this cable or enclosure with your old HD to use as a large USB key. Be careful to get the source and destinations right when doing any cloning, reformatting or reinstalling.

Cloning

If you intend to clone your old HD to your new SSD, for most cloning software to work, your SSD needs to be the same capacity or larger than your HD. You can usually clone a larger HD on a smaller SSD as long as the aggregate size of the partitions you are cloning are smaller than the capacity of the SSD.

If you have a Linux CD or USB key, this will likely have the GParted partitioning tool. On Windows, you can use a product such as EaseUS Partition Master Free Edition. And OS X has Disk Utility.

Also you check the health of your HD before attempting to clone it as bad sectors might cause the cloning to fail. You should also fix any other issues that may affect performance; see how to deal with a slow laptop for Windows computers and how to speed a slow OS X computer for ones running OS X.

Often cloning software is provided with the SSD, otherwise there's free software running on Linux such as Clonezilla.

Reinstall the same operating system

If you are using Windows and want to keep using Windows, you may want to reinstall Windows and your applications from fresh onto the new SSD and then copying your data. Performance of Windows tend to degrade with time, so a new install will give you an additional boost of performance. You will need all your original software and serial numbers to proceed.

Install Linux

See Linux migration.

Dual boot

This allows you to experience the speed and convenience of Linux while give you full access to your previous operating system allowing you to take your time to decide what option suits you best.

[To be written.]

Understanding the technology of SSDs

Hard disks are mechanical while solid state disks, as the name implies, have no mechanical parts. As nothing moves access to any data is much faster than on a HD. That's not the only difference under the hood. Whereas in a hard disk, the act of writing to a sector (typically 512 bytes or 4 KB ) erases the previous content, an SSD must erase a page (the equivalent of sectors, typically 8 KB) before it can be written to and it can only erase blocks of several pages.

Since an SSD does much internal housekeeping transparently to the user, often when it's apparently idle, a sudden power loss can cause it to enter an inconsistent internal state from which it may not be able to recover.

To help the SSD avoiding to copy deleted files when recovering spaces from blocks, the operating system can inform the SSD when it deletes a file. It does this using a mechanism known as TRIM, making it possible for the SSD to avoid rewriting disused data, or to pre-erase the space ready for reuse if the entire block is now free.

TRIM is not essential, but may help prolong the life of an SSD and keep it best performing. For a more detailed explanation see Ask Ars: “My SSD does garbage collection, so I don’t need TRIM… right?”. Be aware that TRIM has been known to cause some data loss.

Windows

SSDs are only properly supported as from Windows Vista, and Windows 7 or later is required to take full advantage. Since SSDs work on a page size typically larger than the sector size for most HDDs, simply cloning an HDD to an SSD may result in a mis-aligned partition and reduced performance. TRIM should be enabled for efficiency reasons.

To check that TRIM is enabled in Windows, launch a command prompt as Administrator, and type the command:

fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

This should return a value of zero. If it returns 1 then type:

fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify 0

Also, check the BIOS settings and find the SATA Mode. This should be AHCI.

OS X

Apple supports TRIM for third party SSDs since OS X 10.10.4. For more information see Latest OS X update allows you to enable TRIM for third-party SSDs.

Linux

[To be written.]

Problems and solutions

An SSD should give trouble-free service and in particular, it will be much less prone to damage through physical shocks than a hard disk. Nevertheless, if it should fail, it may do so catastrophically, with little chance of getting your data back. Bear this in mind if your data is vital to you, and make sure you back it up regularly.

A misbehaving SSD can cause random crashes and system hang-ups which might be suggestive of memory (RAM) or mainboard problems. First of all, check the vendor's website or a management utility which may have come with the SSD for updated firmware. If the utility allows a TRIM on demand, try this. If you have migrated the system from a hard disk, try copying it back to see if the hard disk is any more reliable.

If these suggestions don't help, or in the case of an SSD which has suddenly ceased to be recognised by the computer, boot into the BIOS and leave it for 20 - 30 minutes, then remove all power for a minute. For a desktop, or an SSD on the bench, apply power through the power connector for 20 - 30 minutes, leaving the data disconnected, before removing power for a minute. Repeat this process once or twice more. This may give the SSD time to do internal housekeeping without being bothered by an operating system. After this, check once more for a firmware update or TRIM on demand, which it may not have been able to accept before.

Spinrite has been reported to be effective in some cases of SSDs with degraded performance. It should only be used on an SSD on level 2 as level 4 would perform large numbers of writes, unnecessarily ageing the device. However, level 2 reads every sector in such a way as to prompt the device to reallocate any that are marginal.