Clintlgm wrote:
Well your going about it all wrong, you should be putting in a M.2 NVME SSD, then just clone your hard drive to the new SSD. Clone is an exact copy. SATA SSD = 400 MBS M.2 NVME SSD= 2900 MBS, 2.5 SSD is good for data.

I think he's right. I added a second Samsung 950 Pro to my G752VY last year when I bought it, so I have a 500GB M.2 and a 250GB M.2 and a 1TB HDD. When I received the computer I saw the retailer installed W10 on the HDD (incorrectly) instead of the 500GB where I wanted it, so when I got it I cloned that drive to the 500GB M.2 and reformatted the HDD to eliminate Windows from it. That works nicely and I like the final arrangement. The Samsung 950 Pro M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD performs well in this machine. I highly recommend it (or go with a 960, which I assume will work but have not researched it as of yet, so I can only at the moment recommend the 950 Pro). If you plan to install a lot of games on your SSD my recommendation is get a 500GB drive. W10 + many games = high storage requirements.

davemon50 wrote:
When I received the computer I saw the retailer installed W10 on the HDD (incorrectly) instead of the 500GB where I wanted it, so when I got it I cloned that drive to the 500GB M.2 and reformatted the HDD to eliminate Windows from it. That works nicely and I like the final arrangement. The Samsung 950 Pro M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD performs well in this machine. I highly recommend it (or go with a 960, which I assume will work but have not researched it as of yet, so I can only at the moment recommend the 950 Pro). If you plan to install a lot of games on your SSD my recommendation is get a 500GB drive. W10 + many games = high storage requirements.

I'm interested if you can reset your Windows with F9 after this cloning process directly from your SSD. Do you still have this recovery function available?

My model is G752VY-GC144T, came with GT 980M, 8 GB RAM, i7 6700 HQ.
PCI SSDs are pretty expensive, that's why i was going for the SATA one, i wanted to clone the entire HDD on it, and a 1 GB PCIE SSD is around 500$ in my country. But if cloning only the recovery partition and the windows one over to a new PCI SSD would work flawlessly, maybe a 256/512 GB one would do. Any of them would be a huge jump considering I used the laptop with only an HDD for more than a year.

Hey most of the G752VY came with a 256gb M.2 SSD, that is really all you need for OS drive!! I personally changed mine out for a Samsung 960 Pro 500 GB, My G75 never had anything but a 256GB OS drive that fit all my software with room to spare. I saved up and got the SATA 1TB for data drive later on to replace the 750gb Spinner that came with it. I moved the 850 PRO SATA to my new G752 and put the 1 TB Spinner that it came with into my old G75 and passed it on to a family member.
Your OS needs all the speed it can get. So is you want to save money get a 256gb you might even find a cheap one from someone else that upgraded to 500GB
As far as Clone to what ever hard drive or SSD. You would Clone the entire hard drive to the new SSD. there are several programs out there to accomplish this My choice is Macrium Reflect the free version is all you need. Samsung come with a migration tool I guess it work have never tried it. Acronis and several others are out there with free versions. Where you got this nonsense about cloning only the recovery partition I have no Idea
To Clone is to make an exact bootable copy of your original hard drive.

Clintlgm wrote:

As far as Clone to what ever hard drive or SSD. You would Clone the entire hard drive to the new SSD. there are several programs out there to accomplish this My choice is Macrium Reflect the free version is all you need. Samsung come with a migration tool I guess it work have never tried it. Acronis and several others are out there with free versions. Where you got this nonsense about cloning only the recovery partition I have no Idea
To Clone is to make an exact bootable copy of your original hard drive.

I read on different forums that you don't have to clone the entire thing in order to work. You can clone only the OS partition if you want.
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-3116099/cloning-single-hdd-partition-ssd.html
Here is one of them. What I'm really interested in is if the F9 function will still be available after cloning the required partitions and which are the ones I need to clone in order for this to work.

CerealKillerGuy wrote:
My model is G752VY-GC144T, came with GT 980M, 8 GB RAM, i7 6700 HQ.
PCI SSDs are pretty expensive, that's why i was going for the SATA one, i wanted to clone the entire HDD on it, and a 1 GB PCIE SSD is around 500$ in my country. But if cloning only the recovery partition and the windows one over to a new PCI SSD would work flawlessly, maybe a 256/512 GB one would do. Any of them would be a huge jump considering I used the laptop with only an HDD for more than a year.

I was figuring you had to be where they released them with a spinner only.
A SATA HDD is 5x faster than a spinner but an M2 NVMe is 25x faster! 1GB M2 drives aren't exactly cheap anywhere. The the 960 pro 1GB is over $600 in the US, I put two of them in my desktop machine.

Fairly economical solution?

As that Bayou critter Clint stated you can get a much smaller M2. The larger ones are not linearly priced by the bit.
A Samsung 960 evo is about $125 in the US and will hold your OS and apps fine.
If you need 1TB for media then grab a separate 850 evo thats goes for about $325 in the US. Or if you can squeak by with less the 500 GB 850 EVO is $150

At an rate you can still clone to a SATA SSD just fine but my take is why upgrade from a tricycle to a moped when you can have a Bugatti for not much more. no matter just be sure to take the spinner out and put in in a box somewhere for safe keeping. You will thank me for it later!
For one its a hard copy of your original equipment and two, its just a matter of a short time before it bites the dust. I dont know why they put those cheap POS HGST drives in a high end machine.

Mine came with a 256GB M2 and a 1TB spinner. the 256 GB was pulled for a pair of 500GB 950 pros in raid zero which I don't recommend. They work fine but because of a DMI bottle neck the sequential read speeds only increase like 100MBps from 2500 to 2600 and there is a better increase in writes but still not enough to make it worth the trouble. The 256GB lives in one of the 950 pro boxes in my desk drawer for reasons mentioned already. The 1TB death star is dead. I bought my daughter a lesser ASUS to get proficient on as she is now a HS grad and going off to college in the fall. It too came with the HGST death star. Less than 50 hours of use, it bit the dust. So I put my extra in. Less than 100 hours of use, it too bit the dust so I replaced it with a 500 GB 850 pro. Both death stars failed in the same manner. They didnt just quit, They got ridiculously slow and eventually to the point they OS would not load. I took them apart and the bearings on the platters were not completely seized but they were not far from it. Power it up and you could see it start to spin very slowly and hear a faint grinding sound. pull the power and they stopped immediately instead if coasting. After spinning for just a few minutes the cases were too hot to touch.