How to add SSD as boot drive without wiping hard drive?

Have you purchased a new brand new SSD and want to take advantage of its faster speed, but also don’t want to delete your the information on the old hard drive? In recent years SSD’s are becoming increasingly popular as the primary drive where the OS is located.

That’s because SSD’s are much faster, up to 10x faster and for a gamer this is great. That’s because you get to enjoy faster loading screens, which is ideal if you hate the transition from one level to another. Tips presented in loading screens help overcome the boredom somewhat, but after you have read the same tip for the 10^th time you just want to get on with the game, and SSD’s are perfect for that.

Before you do anything backup your data in case something goes wrong. Family photos and work related documents in a worst case scenario can be deleted so do take this precaution. You can use a number of different backup options such as a cloud based service or a company that specializes in backing up data for a small fee.

How to install your SSD

There are two main ways of adding an SSD which is to complete a fresh install on the SSD, but this has the disadvantage of having to download and reinstall programs. On the other hand, you can transfer the current OS set-up from the hard drive to the SSD, but this is a little more complicated.

The latter method involves shrinking the size of the hard drive by deleting personal files, which is not what we want to do here. Therefore, a fresh install of the SSD is the way to go. Here is the step by step process of how to do it:

1. Disconnect your current hard drive
2. Connect the new SSD you wish to install
3. Turn on the PC and begin the installation of the SSD
4. Now reconnect the old hard drive
5. Set the SSD as the boot device and you’re done.

To gain some extra space from your old hard drive delete the OS as you only need to have the OS on the new SSD. This will give you even more space to save games, personal files and photos. All SSD’s can be added as the boot device in this manner – it doesn’t matter which specific one you’ve purchased.

Conclusion

If you have the budget for a brand new SSD then it’s worth the investment as the loading times for the OS and games is much faster. This isn’t a matter of just a few seconds, you can cut down a loading screen that before would take 30 seconds down to a fraction of that time.

The installation process as you can see is quite simple and you won’t have to delete the data on your old hard drive. Just remember that you’ll need to install programs again because the OS has been freshly installed.