Anyone swapped out a mechanical drive for an SSD on laptop as the boot drive ?  I have a 750 G drive and want to install a 1TB drive.  (they are about 260 now on amazon !)
Looks pretty straight forward using a SATA to USB cable and cloning software, but is there anything unique to a Sonar DAW that I should be aware of ?
I assume I will have to reauthorize all my plugs and vsti etc ?
 
Thanks

would first check if your laptop (components) and Windows version would benefit from installing that SSD.
swapping the components might be simple, but then getting all the software and components to work / do what it's designed for properly might be tricky or impossible.
that is my first thought as a not specilist.

I did this 6 months ago on my laptop. Much faster. I took an image of my hard drive and copied it over using Paragon Hard Disk manager. No reauthorising needed.

Thanks Mudgel...SSD is on the way!
 
Shearnes - my first benefit will be to get a new drive, the existing one is getting a little weird and my spidey senses tell me it is time to make a change on my terms!
 
I will let you all know how my swap goes.
 
JR

I've done it on 2 laptops using Samsung SSD's and their SW with a cheap external USB drive housing. There were no issues and performance is dramatically better.

All done!! 
 
Sonar projects load so much faster...wow !!
I installed a 1TB WD SDD - so there were a few extra wrinkles !
 
1) The SSD comes completely dead, un-formatted, useless piece of silicon.  So you need to initialize and format it.  Windows disk management is good for this.
2) For some reason the WD version of Acronis that is free with WD drives, does not recognize a WD SSD drive at the end of a SATA to USB cable.  And the Software will not run unless it detects a WD drive. Luckily I had a an external USB WD drive and was able to use this to run WD version of Acronis so I could make an Acronis boot disk.  (Note : laptops will not boot from an external USB device...you need make Acronis Boot media.)
3) When you install the SSD as the target drive in your laptop, do not forget to plug your AC adapter for the laptop back in.  I forgot to plug in the AC adapter and came back to a non-responsive, dead laptop.  I almost cried.  I plugged it back in and restarted the cloning process and it all worked over night.  (whew !)
4) I am still working out how to correct my partitions.  I had 3 partitions on my old HDD (C (boot) D (recovery) E (FAT32 HP tools).  And I was going from 750 G to 1TB drive.  Could not manually set the partitions on C drive.  Cloning would only allow the exact same size on the new C partition so now I have 240 G of un-allocated disk space.  Apparently  you can add this to the C drive in windows....I am looking into this.
 
Hope this helps
 
JR

mudgel
I did this 6 months ago on my laptop. Much faster. I took an image of my hard drive and copied it over using Paragon Hard Disk manager. No reauthorising needed.

thanks Mike!  I've been wanting to do this for a while.  I have a 250G SSD and I want to upgrade it to a 1T but I've been afraid to try it.  I rely on that computer every week!

auto_da_fe
(Note : laptops will not boot from an external USB device...you need make Acronis Boot media.)

 
I'm glad you got things figured out, but I boot laptops from external USB devices often, so I'm not sure what you mean here!  Usually you just hit the F-key for the boot options menu while starting the laptop up (F8 or F12 usually), then select your media and off you go.
 

auto_da_fe
2) For some reason the WD version of Acronis that is free with WD drives, does not recognize a WD SSD drive at the end of a SATA to USB cable.

There's a few SSD relevant things the USB protocols don't support. Another important one is that you can't send the SSD TRIM commands over USB, only over SATA or Thunderbolt.

And not all drive enclosures with a Thunderbolt socket can either - the ones that are USB/Thunderbolt usually have an internal construction that's USB with the Thunderbolt socket added on to that rather than being native Thunderbolt. So again, no TRIM.

Fortunately at least Windows recognises a USB attached SSD is an SSD so doesn't automatically defragment it.

Craigb - I agree with you and I do not understand why this would be an issue, but it was.  Maybe I was doing something wrong, but I thought that with my SSD target drive in laptop, and source drive in a USB - SATA enclosure my laptop would boot (Source drive was a good image).  Even went into BIOS and played with boot orders...nothing.   I can say that for sure you can boot from a DVD drive.
 
Thanks tlw for the clarification.  
 
JR