Upgrading Alienware Alpha HD questions

I am running out of room on my harddrive so I bought a 1TB drive and want to put it in. I am watching videos on Youtube and it seems straightforward but I have a couple questions.

1. I upgraded to Windows 10 when I first got the machine - so if I use Alieware Respawn will it keep Windows 10 (and will it still be registered)?

Or

2. Could I use Clonezilla? Then I can right the image to to the new big hard drive. If that would work I wouldn't have to reinstall apps etc. Has anyone tried using that instead of Respawn?

Thanks

I have an Alpha too! I love it, except for the loud fans.

AlienRespawn, per my understanding, is capable of the following:

* Restoring your OS to its factory image
* Create bootable rescue disks
* Selectively backup and restore files

It will NOT allow you to clone an image of your current HD onto the new 1TB HD you bought.

Clonezilla, however, should work.

farley3k wrote:

1. I upgraded to Windows 10 when I first got the machine - so if I use Alieware Respawn will it keep Windows 10 (and will it still be registered)?

Even a fresh install from a disc created using Microsoft's Media Creation Tool should work fine at that point.

you will have to resize the partition as well if you do a one to one clone. Make sure its created the partitions properly and you don't end up with a non-movable partition in-between your existing c: partition and the un-used space.

I got it all working but my old HD was an SSD 240GB and the new one was a 1TB 5400 RPM drive. I *thought* the drop in speed would mostly be when loading games, etc. but I was wrong. It was horribly slow. When playing Tomb Raider it was almost unplayable.

So I put back in the SSD drive and am going to have to shuffle installs to make space because I am not really ready to buy a new PC yet.

You can pick up a 500GB SSD now for $140USD. That's maybe your best bet.

farley3k wrote:

I got it all working but my old HD was an SSD 240GB and the new one was a 1TB 5400 RPM drive.

This is a painful sentence.

Any reason you can't just keep the SSD and add an additional 7200rpm HD as a secondary disk for bulk storage?

Or roll with Robear's suggestion and add another SSD which is what I would do.

The Alpha has a single 2.5" internal drive bay.

You could just get a larger one (it's at least cheaper than an entire new machine) as Robear mentioned.

Kurrelgyre wrote:

The Alpha has a single 2.5" internal drive bay.

You could just get a larger one (it's at least cheaper than an entire new machine) as Robear mentioned.

Ok, go the second SSD route then. No moving parts. Use double sided tape or stick on Velcro and just put the second SSD wherever you can get cables to.

At one point I had 6 SSD's in a case with mounting spots for only two. The other four were just stuck to the back of the motherboard tray. Worked perfectly.

*Looking at teardowns of the Alpha I see space is supremely hard to come by. Is it a later revision that has an m.2 slot that's just going unused? That would allow you to add another SSD without any worries about space or cables.