The boot drive is the most fundamental of all the drives your PC may use, as it contains the operating system. Whether it's a hard disk drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD), it has everything ...

Use Macrium Reflect to make a disk image on an external drive. Use same to make a bootable copy that allows you to copy the disk image to the new SSD. I just did it, refreshingly easy.

Boot your PC with the USB drive as the primary storage, select the SSD when prompted, and follow the instructions on-screen. Is it OK to use SSD and HDD together?

We offer step-by-step tutorials on how to clone your hard drive or a single drive partition.

I was thinking, though: how would that work with the boot drive, the regular drive and the optical drive if the Sandy Bridge chipset only has two workable SATA channels?