Migrating Windows 10 from an SSD to a HDD
Summary
If you are using the basic version of FuzeDrive with an lower SSD capacity limit (e.g. 128GB), the software will not support the ability to directly convert the SSD boot OS drive to a FuzeDrive and expand it's capacity if the SSD is greater in size than the license limit. The software can only direct convert operating systems on an SSD that you wish to retain as the fast drive in the storage tier if they are smaller than the license limit. If using the SSD as a slow tier device (e.g. you are adding an NVMe SSD to an existing SATA SSD OS boot drive) then this limit does not apply.
If you wish to stay with the lower cost license capacity constraint and the software will not support your SSD OS transform to a FuzeDrive, it is still possible to use a portion of your current SSD OS boot drive to accelerate Windows. This is accomplished by using a migration tool such as Macrium Reflect (www.macrium.com) to first migrate your OS to the slower capacity device you are trying to create a FuzeDrive with.
NOTE, your system will start with HDD performance for a short while until it has fully warmed and migrated all the boot and application files to the SSD, after which your system will perform at SSD rates again.
Steps to Migrate from SSD to HDD
The following outlines how this may be done using the Macrium Reflect software as an example. Please note, this material is provided for reference only. Please contact Macrium directly if you have questions about their software.
It is assumed that there is a blank hard drive (or other slow tier device) available for this exercise.
STEP 1: Open Disk Manager, and the view should look something like the following:
STEP 2: Run Macrium. You should see something like the following:
STEP 3: Under the SSD Drive, Select "Clone the disk".
STEP 4: Select the Hard Drive to Clone to and when presented with the Backup Save Options, deselect "Save backup and schedules as XML....".
STEP 5: Press OK and the Clone Process will Proceed (may a while depending on how much data is on the SSD).
STEP 6: Once the clone operation successfully completes, reboot the PC, enter setup and select the HDD as the boot drive. For example:
NOTE: your BIOS display may look different. Look for Boot Options and HDD boot order menu.
STEP 7: After you have satisfied yourself that the HDD boot drive is a full and successful clone of the SSD, proceed with wiping the SSD. Open an Administrator Command Prompt and use Diskpart to select the SSD and use the clean command. For our example above, we wish to clean disk 1 (the SSD).
You may also use Disk Manager to expand the size of the boot volume. If you have a recovery partition, see the following KB for more information on how to handle expansion for this case. Note, you may wish to wait until the FuzeDrive has been added before you expand with a recovery partition.
STEP 8: You may proceed with creating the FuzeDrive using the Accelerate My BootDrive or Create Bootable FuzeDrive option.
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