I paired this SSD with a Kingspec M.2(NGFF) USB 3.0 External SSD Enclosure Conveter Case
Kingspec M.2(NGFF) to USB 3.0 External SSD Enclosure Conveter Case with Cable
and I used Macrium[...] to clone my existing SSD. Just for safe measure, I used Macrium to create a bootable USB thumb drive. I did this because I was concerned about my cloned drive being assigned drive letter :E instead of :C. I would make a bootable USB before swapping out drives regardless.
After I cloned my drive to the new drive, my new drive had a large volume that was unallocated. Macrium will only clone the original partition/volume of you old drive leaving a large volume of unallocated disk space. To fix this I needed another app because Macrium and Windows Disk Management will not merge the unallocated volume to increase my C: drive partition. So at this point I still effectively had the same size ssd as what I had before.
I then downloaded AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Edition to remedy this problem [...]. With AOMEI it was super easy to merge the unallocated disk space to finally increase my C: drive. If I had known about AOMEI first, I wouldn't have bothered with Macrium because AOMEI will also clone. So I would suggest just using this app for the whole cloning process.
Next, I had to swap the drives out. Taking the bottom panel off of my Spectre X360 was a lot like separating the broken glass from an LCD panel on a smart phone. Not quite as difficult but similar. I even used the same style prying tools (guitar pick style tool). Once the bottom panel was off, the ssd was easily swapped out. There is only one screw to remove on the laptop’s SSD. Three screws total on the Kingspec SSD enclosure (two on either end of the enclosure and one on the ssd itself). Also, I need to mention that I never addressed the drive letter issue. I just trusted that the computer would re-assign the new My Digital SSD drive letter C: on first boot which it indeed did! I didn’t even need to use a bootable USB drive.
Performance difference: I ran a few benchmark apps on the existing drive in the Spectre X360 before I had done the swap. After I did the swap, the My Digital SSD dramatically outperformed the original SSD that had come with my Spectre X360. Boot up times remained at the 10-11 second range but overall performance is much better. This is definitely a very fast drive. Well worth the money!!
Overall I would have to say that this was a very fast, easy and straight forward procedure. When I cloned my SSD, the image was about 210 GB in size and only took about 20-30 minutes to clone. Once I had made the swap, I put my original 250GB drive in the Kingspec enclosure to use as an external drive. It works great for that! I will say that the Kingspec enclosure does get pretty warm when cloning your old drive or when transferring large volumes of data. All-in-all this was a worthy investment!!!
| Hard Drive | 512 GB Solid State Drive |
|---|
