Solid State Drives (SSDs) are one of the best upgrades you can get for your system (server, workstation and laptop). One of the issues they do have however, is that they are generally a *lot* smaller than the spinning drive they replaced, because of their high relative price.
One of the issues about astroimaging is that every new camera you get, the bigger the image file size is and the faster you run out of drive space.
We had a laptop with a 120GB SSD and with a full load of Windows 7 (windows 10 died during an unstoppable update, so we replaced it), and a few images runs and it was almost full. So this past weekend we replaced it with a larger one.
Step 1. clean up the existing drive. That got rid of a few GB.
Step 2. run macrium reflect and do a complete disk image, storing it on the local network file server. This took about 1-2 hours.
Step 3. shutdown the laptop, remove the old drive, label it, install the new 480GB SSD drive, label it, close up the laptop
Step 4. Boot form the Macrium reflect DVD recovery media, browse the local network to find the disk image and start the restore. This took about 1-2 hours.
Step 5. Start up Win7, let it complete a chkdsk. Restart it again and open up the computer, manage, storage, disk management and expand the 120GB parititon to the full drive size, about 435GB formatted). Restart one last time.
Done!
We had about 10-15 GB free before, now we have 330-350 GB free, more than enough space for an entire nights imaging run.