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#140
Basically it's merely a matter of cloning your boot drive/partition to the SSD, so long as your c:\ boot drive doesn't presently contain more data than your SSD is large. (IE, a 400 GB c:\ partition with 100GB of free space won't clone so well to a 256GB SSD.. OTOH, a 400GB c:\ partition with 200GB free will clone just fine to a 256GB SSD, etc. ) Once you get it going you'll ask yourself why you waited so long....
I don't think you are any kind of happy camper right about now! That stinks! But I have said on a few occasions even a clean install of Windows can come out pooched at times! Seen that too but not for some time. You got an odd one there, You might end up repairing it or simply slapping another fresh one on if you can't debug this one.
Speaking for yourself I assume?! Some people like small drives while I run out of space too fast for anything less then 1tb! Go price a 1tb SSD and see what it runs for and you can almost put a new build together. Higher priced and your are limited on how many times you can write to one of those.
On the other hand the two Sata II 1tb OS drives here are now 5yrs. old and still not a bad sector on either one. Can't say the same for the pair of Sata III 1tbs I replaced with a pair of 2tb RE Heavy Duty server type drives but one made a good storage drive on another less often used build while the other? Foobar land now! Some 250gb IDE drives now well over 10yrs. still working.
Hey since your in Canada, and Ontario for that matter .... NCIX and Canada Computers will have very competitive prices. Make sure to check their pages daily as they always have deals floating around at certain points. Expect before the Christmas rush that CC will have the Samsung drives $15-30 off retail prices.
But if you want best of the best in the 2.5" SSD configuration I would go with Samsung 850 PRO drivers (cheaper alternative) or Intel 730's series drives. I personally prefer the Samsung SSD's because the Magician software is amazing, tells you SMART health, the life of the drive and how many TB you have written to the disk. Samsung guarantees a minimum of 90TiB writes before failure but on the older molders 840 EVO and PRO they managed to get writes into the 150~200TiB range before the SSD's started crashing, I don't have the site off the top of my head right now because I'm at work but yea, they did pretty good and I believe these guys were doing 300GB cycle writes and really abused the drives and they took a beating.
Also the Magician Software has a RAPID mode for the SSD that works in W10 now (updated to v4.8) yay which when enabled you get way over the 530MB/s read/write speeds and over 90K ops if you tweak the drive accordingly which can all be done via the software. Look into them Edwin. Probably the PRO series would be better for a big user and enthusiast as yourself. I went with the SAMSUNG 850 EVO models since I don't do crazy writes to my SSD (less then 10GB a day) lol ..... good luck brother.
ps: Like mentioned below the PRO does come with a 10 year warranty I believe the INTEL 730's as well, but cant confirm ATM as I am at work but pricey for us in Ontario. $180 + tax for 256GB model of the Samsung 850 PRO. Roughs out to .78 cents a GB (incl the taxes).
I got the 500GB 850 EVO for $210. It's on sale again right now. Down from $230. Thinking about grabbing the 250GB model for my laptop its on sale for $120 at CC.