I'm going to be needing to clone my Win 10 SSD to a new, larger SSD.

The SSD I'm using now is a 500G and it's getting full, so I have a 1 terabyte* on the way.

The 500G is set up as SATA. Nothing is wrong, it's just too small so I'll probably use it as data.
I plan to set the new one up as SATA also, but do I call it "C new" for now or name the old one "C old" and let Windows figure it out?
New Egg suggested AOMEI free as a good choice for cloning.

I am still running the free version of Win10 so I'm wondering if I'll need to plea my case to Microsoft to keep using the free version.

So can I expect smooth sailing, or do you guys see any issues I need to deal with before hand?

Old drive is a Crucial CT240M500SSD1 ATA
*New drive:
*WD Blue 3D NAND 1TB Internal SSD - SATA III 6Gb/s 2.5"/7mm Solid State Drive - WDS100T2B0A

Windows 10 Home
Version # 10.0.18362 Build 18362

A screen shot of the Disk Manager is attached.

I hope to have my courage up in the next couple of days...

Thanks in advance

You say your running va free version explain what you mean? There shouldn't be a problem cloning the whole drive but there may be a problem if you put the old drive in with the new one as both disk signatures will be the same so you may get a collision

If you clone the old drive to a new one, that shouldn't trigger Window re-activation. Even if it did, you'd still be OK. A new motherboard could lead to activation issues; a new drive will not.

As your new drive is from WDC, you could use a (limited) version of Acronis True Image for the cloning. It's a free download from WDC.com. I don't know whether it is superior to the freeware alternatives. I have used the paid version, but not for straight cloning: I imaged the drive, and restored the image to the new drive. (I restored it at the same size, and had to use Disk Management to expand the primary partition. Worked well.)

If you wish to keep the old drive for data, you'll need to get rid of the Windows installtion on it. I'd probably just reformat it, once it was clear that it was safe. (That's one advantage to using an image rather than cloning: you can go back again, if you need to.)

Thanks to all...

I'll probably go for a straight forward cloning, I guess if I have to expand into the unallocated space, that should be pretty easy. I want to use the entire drive for the OS and programs.

My plan will be to clone to the new drive, shut down. Then disconnect the old drive and then boot with the new drive. Will Windows know it's an O/S and boot OK?

But from what all of you have told me, I think I can get thorough it with out destroying my system.

One more quick question here: I have one huge 85 gig game I can easily reinstall. (Battlefield 5).
Should I delete it to speed things up? Or will it make any real difference?

Free version as in the free download of the Win10 upgrade over Win7 back a year or two ago.

I would suggest using Macrium Reflect to make a image of the old drive then do a restore to the new drive. Macrium Software | Macrium Reflect Free

I have decided I’m going to go with Macrium free. I’ll probably clone to an old back up drive, then to the new drive.

I’m going to mark this solved and if something goes wrong, I’ll be back. Macrium seems pretty safe and I should do OK.

Thank all of you for your help!

chuckiechan said:

I have decided I’m going to go with Macrium free. I’ll probably clone to an old back up drive, then to the new drive.

I’m going to mark this solved and if something goes wrong, I’ll be back. Macrium seems pretty safe and I should do OK.

Thank all of you for your help!

I presume that you mean that you'll save an iamge of the current SSD to a backup drive, and then restore it to the new SSD.

Sounds like a plan.

chuckiechan said:

I have decided I’m going to go with Macrium free. I’ll probably clone to an old back up drive, then to the new drive.

I’m going to mark this solved and if something goes wrong, I’ll be back. Macrium seems pretty safe and I should do OK.

Thank all of you for your help!

I've never had 100% success cloning a old drive to a new drive. Imaging a drive has always worked better for me.

If you use Acronis, there is an option to clone the partitions proportionally so you don't need to expand the partition after cloning, it is done automatically. It is really simple. Connect both drives, boot with Acronis Rescue CD (you can create it using the trial version of Acronis Ture Home), clone the disk and shutdown. Make sure you set the boot priority on BIOS so that the new disk appears first on the list and then the old one. A safe trick is to connect the new disk at the SATA0 port and the old disk on another SATA port. Even if you are out of BIOS battery and it resets to the default settings, being the first SATA device should always have higher boot priority than the older disk. So connect the new device at SATA0 and make sure it has higher priority in BIOS (just in case). If done correctly, Windows 10 should boot from the new disk rather than the old one. To check that go to This PC and see the C: drive. If you cloned proportionally it should be 9xxGB (1TB). Or right-click on This PC, select Manage to open Computer Management and then click on Disk Manager to verify that the C: partition is on the 1TB disk.