I have an olde Lenovo Yoga laptop that I use for troubleshooting and monitoring my 3D printers, and some other small stuff around the house. It has gotten painfully slow recently so I'd like to give it a little help. RAM is soldered to the MB so the 4Gb I got is all I'm going to have, but I figured if I swapped out the 10 year old spinny platter drive with an SSD she might run a little faster.
I've already sourced the adapter I need to put an M.2 SSD in it, and I can get a Tb WD Black for $75 or so, but the catch is there's some stuff on the drive I like and use, and I'd like to not start from scratch. So my thought is get the new drive, put it in a USB adapter and plug it in to the computer, clone the existing drive, swap hardware, and Bob's your uncle.
First of all, will that work? Or will I make my new shiny drive think it's 256 mb or something? Second, if it will work, what's the cheapest bit of software to do the clone with?
Thanks.