I'm using an Omen gaming laptop with Windows 11 and a 13th Gen Intel Core i7 processor. My laptop is running slow when I try to launch games, and I just discovered that all my game files are stored on the HDD (C: drive). Upon checking, I realized that there's an SSD (SK Hynix PC801 HFS001TEJ9X101N) installed, but it's not being used— it shows 100% free space in settings. I did a disk management check, and it looked like Windows is only using the HDD. I'm not very tech-savvy, so I'm unsure if the SSD is malfunctioning or just not set up correctly. I plan to get a new laptop soon, but I want to see if I can fix this issue first. Any advice would be appreciated!
2 Answers
You can't just pull Windows files out from the HDD that easily, but if you can confirm you really have two physical drives and that the SSD has enough space, you can use a cloning tool like Clonezilla or Rescuezilla. These can help you copy everything from your HDD. Just remember to keep user data on the HDD to free up space on the SSD for games and programs.
It sounds like your laptop may have been set up to install Windows on the HDD rather than the SSD. If that's the case, you're right—putting your OS and games on the SSD could really boost performance! You could look into cloning your HDD to the SSD, which would create an exact copy of everything. Just make sure to follow up with setting the SSD as the boot drive afterward. Just a heads up, you might have to reactivate Windows after this since you’ll be changing a key hardware component.
Do you know which software would be best for cloning? I’ve heard of a couple of options but not sure what works well.
I’m not sure if I have two drives or if the SSD is even larger than the HDD since I only see the SSD listed as 953 GB. Do you think I can check this in the settings?