Want to Clone SSD to Higher Capacity SSD

My brother's birthday is coming up next month, and one of the things im thinking of getting for him for his birthday is a higher capacity m.2 nvme ssd for his computer, got my eyes on a 500 GB one. The one his OS is installed on is an NVMe LITEON 256GB. his Computer is a pre-configured Alienware Aurora R5 desktop, and he's nearly managed to fill up his main C; drive real quick because APPARENTLY he wanted to try out star citizen and will NOT remove it from his setup

I dont want to go through the hassle of reinstalling everything, so is there a way I can "clone" his current OS setup onto the higher capacity when/IF I manage to get his new ssd without little to no hassle, or am I going to be going through a bunch of hoops to do this?

His dell procut service tag is 486HMD2 if one wishes to see his setup; he does have a 2 TB SSHD for documents/videos/other programs/stuff, so there's that

Use Macrium Reflect Free to save an image of the current SSD to the SSHD. Also make sure to create the Macrium Reflect recovery flash drive. Swap out the SSDs. Boot computer from the recovery flash drive. Restore the image back to the new SSD, resize the Windows partition in the process to fill the larger drive.

For the internal SSD this is a link to free up space.
Often windows.old was not automatically deleted.

Free Up Drive Space in Windows 10
Delete Windows.old Folder in Windows 10

Plankton said:

WD and Samsung have their own proprietary software to clone drives. They are readily downloadable for free. Depending on the brand you buy....use their suggested software and follow those instructions.

Personally, when I get a new drive....I always do a clean install. I just like the new snappy feel of the OS.

Except that to truly clone the drive they would have to both be connected at the same time which would require two NVMe capable m.2 slots.

Plankton said:

WD and Samsung have their own proprietary software to clone drives. They are readily downloadable for free. Depending on the brand you buy....use their suggested software and follow those instructions.

Personally, when I get a new drive....I always do a clean install. I just like the new snappy feel of the OS.

Much of the clone software bundled with new drives is by Acronis whose products I avoid. Macrium Reflect is the way to go,

so just use macrium reflect on the main OS drive to make a backup image, then shutdown, disconnect the old SSD, put the new one in, boot to the recovery media, and just restore from the backup, I get that

but can the recovery environment let me change the space of the new drive that easily? or do I need to initialize/format/resize, THEN restore the OS backup on it?

and I checked on the micron website for ANY kind of its own version of backing up/restoring ssd/hdd software, but I couldnt find anything with what I tried on firefox; their support seems to be a mess I cant make sense of

BrokenDaily said:

but can the recovery environment let me change the space of the new drive that easily? or do I need to initialize/format/resize, THEN restore the OS backup on it?

You shouldn't have to do anything other than restore. When finished, take a look at Windows Disk Management to confirm that the sizing is as expected. Partition size can always be adjusted after the fact if necessary.

BrokenDaily said:

but can the recovery environment let me change the space of the new drive that easily? or do I need to initialize/format/resize, THEN restore the OS backup on it?

Do not create any partitions on the new SSD. Just make sure it is the same partition type as the old SSD (GPT or MBR, probably GPT). You can do the restore by dragging and dropping the individual partitions from the backup image to the unallocated space on the new SSD. When you drag and drop the C: drive partition, you can resize it.