Upgrade Your Old Spinning Hard Drive With A Solid State Drives (SSD)
Do a clean install of Windows 10
If your Windows 10 computer takes a long time to boot up, that's likely because it runs on a regular hard drive. This is also the case of most older computers. Replacing that hard drive with a solid-state drive (SSD) will make the machine run much faster.
I have replaced the spinning hard drives with Solid State Drives (SSD) in all of my legacy computers, the startup speed improvement is stunning. For example here are the actual startup improvement I experienced older Intel Core 2 desktop computer.
| Time to login screen | Total time till all system files loaded | |
| Spinning Drive | 90 sec | 330 sec (5 1/2 min) |
| New SSD | 20 sec | 34 sec This is a 10 times faster startup. |
- Crucial MX500 250 GB 3D NAND SATA 2.5 Inch Internal SSD $45
- ADATA SU800 128GB 3D-NAND 2.5 Inch SATA III $25
- StarTech USB 3.0 to 2.5" SATA III Hard Drive Adapter Cable for SSD/HDD $12.50
Use this USB cable to connect the SSD to you computer, run free Acronis True Image that is included with Crucial MX300 SSD's. Acronis True Image software will allow you to clone your old hard drive to the new SSD before you install it.
Installing an SSD is easy – no computer skills necessary!
Do a clean install of Windows 10 on your new SSD or existing drive
Download and run the media creation tool to get started. For more information on how to use the tool, see the instructions below.
After downloading, Media Creation Tool click to run it, follow these steps. (you will need a 4GB or larger thumb drive)
- Accept the Microsoft software license terms.
- Select "Create installation media for another PC" and click Next button
- At Select language, architecture, and edition choose US – Windows 10 and 64 bit click Next
- Choose which media to use I recommend USB flash drive (you need at least 4GB flash drive) plug it into the computer and click Next
- Be sure your flash drive is discovered select it and click Next.
- Downloading and building the install media will proceed. Depending on your internet and computer speed this may take up to an hour.
You will now have a bootable USB thumb drive to use for installing Windows 10.
How To Do A Clean Installation Of Windows 10 by Tom's Hardware
This tutorial was written by Tom's Hardware Community member darkbreeze.
This tutorial is intended to help you, step by step, perform a clean install of Windows 10 (Build 1709 or newer). It can be equally applied to earlier installer versions that may simply lack some of the Cortana-assisted settings screens but should be similar in all other regards.
12-minute guide; Windows 10 fresh install from USB download to new SSD/PC. – By Andrew Thrasher, www.youtube.com VIDEO
This guide is intended to help you perform a fresh installation of Windows 10 on your computer. This can be helpful if you have a new SSD and need to install Windows or if your computer came with a lot of bloatware and you want a fresh start. The whole process will usually take under a half-hour to the Windows desktop on a modern i5 with SSD. Hope this guide helps. Let me know if you have any questions and I'll try to get you an answer.
Solid State Drives
A new Crucial SSD (includes free cloning/data transfer software), a SATA to USB cable, a form of Windows installation media (CD, flash drive, etc.), a screwdriver, and an ESD wrist strap (while not entirely necessary, ESD wrist straps are very inexpensive and help mitigate the risk of static damage to your system).
You can purchase everything you need for this type of install on Crucial.com.
I recommend you do a clean install of Windows 10 as described above. However, if you can't do a clean install because (you have software installed but do not have license keys or the install disks) you may need to clone the existing installation unto the new SSD. Here is Crucial's instruction for cloning your existing hard drive installation on Microsoft Windows computers.