Question about adding SSD to an old computer

<p>Most folks make their primary OS disk the SSD and use HDD as secondary storage for things like media and games.&nbsp; An SSD as the primary disk will be&nbsp;the most beneficial&nbsp;in my opinion.&nbsp; If you have a lot of RAM (&gt;-= 16 GB), then maybe not so much after the OS&nbsp;gets fully&nbsp;up.&nbsp; But I've never tested that.</p><p>Are you just looking at cloning the disk or are you also hoping to expand storage?&nbsp;&nbsp; What size is your current HDD and what size SSD do you have in mind?&nbsp; </p><p>Usually HDDs are much larger than SSDs, but it depends on the age of the HDD.&nbsp; It is more difficult to clone a large HDD and move to a smaller SSD.&nbsp; It takes some work to shrink your primary partition down to fit.&nbsp; And if there are hidden partitions beyond it, those have to be addressed.</p><p>If you are going from equal size, or up to larger, that's trivial and&nbsp;there are a number of tools available to help with that.&nbsp; And as somone else said, these are often included with SSD's for free.&nbsp; Crucial used to provide a copy of Acronis True Image.&nbsp; Macrium Reflect is free for home use.&nbsp; I've used both and they&nbsp;work pretty well.&nbsp; I hate that they actually install on the working OS&nbsp;rather working truly independently of what's on the disk.</p><p>If you are moving to a larger disk and your current drive has a lot of hidden partitions for things like Intel RapidStart and an OEM recovery image that is beyond your current primary partition, it can be tricky to expand your storage space.&nbsp; I usually just blow those away and recreate as necessary if I really want/need a larger partition.&nbsp; The other option is to just mount the free space as a separate drive.&nbsp; I don't feel that's very clean.&nbsp; It's not my preference.</p><p>A clean install is a great option if you can do that.&nbsp; You will have to reinstall everything.&nbsp; It is not a requirement by any means.&nbsp;&nbsp;I personally believe it&nbsp;will only help if your current install is very old and your registry and disk&nbsp;have a lot of residual app/OS update&nbsp;crud that is slowing down the machine.&nbsp; Do you feel like the machine is running roughly at the same speed as it was when new?&nbsp; If so, a fresh install may not be all that helpful.&nbsp; If it is substantially different, then a fresh install may be a good idea.&nbsp; Regardless of what you choose, you will notice a huge difference going from a HDD to a SSD, even with the Crucial, which is slower than the Samsung drives.</p><p><br></p>