My own M.2 SSD instillation experience.

The SPCTUG was looking at add an SSD to their PC and that prompted me to look what I did to add a Samsung 232 GB SATA SSD to my desktop and to see if it would take Windows 11, it won’t! Thanks Microsoft. My MB had a sudden failure and got my favourite repairer to do a quick upgrade as I had the drives. They installed a B250M MSI motherboard. I confess I didn’t look at the specs more the price. On rechecked what I had done to install the SSD I found the MB had an M.2 slot which is a slot to allow the instillation of an SSD direct to the MB.

If I had understood what a M.2 was, I may have added one rather then a SATA SSD however they were expensive.

So, as the prises are coming down I purchased a Samsung SSD 980 NVMe M.2 1TB.

Next was to install the drive. It’s a simple plug-in slot with a screw at the other end.

I unscrew the screw, slide the drive into the slot.

and after several attempts and nearly losing the screw screwed the drive down to complete instillation.

I checked the devise manager and the drive showed up.

I then had to set the new drive as the C drive. There was much made of Samsung Magician to clone the drive and I used it to check the drive state and update the firmware but I couldn’t find how to use it to clone the drive.

So, I found the Samsung Data Migration Tool. The migration tool formatted and cloned the new 1TB from the origianl C drive, The process took about 10 minutes.

The M.2 slot if used turns off the 1st SATA port. I have three drives on the computer all using the SATA ports so I had to re-plug all the drives to avoid the 1st port.

All I had to do then was enter the BIOS and allocate the new drive as the C drive.

I selected Boot option 1 and changed the order of the boot.

Now it takes less than 20 seconds to boot up from cold to login screen.