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Hi Leon - I do this for a living and cloning disks and upgrading to windows 10 has been my bread and butter for the last year.
I alternate between using a software solution with an externally connected USB disk, and a disk duplicator. It depends on the circumstances.
I refuse to do a windows 10 upgrade for a business client unless I do a solid state disk upgrade first. There are 3 of reasons for this
1 - 5 year plus old hard disks are usually corrupted in one way or another, and the migration to a solid state disk often fixes those problems - the disk duplicator I use seems to be very good at extracting hard-to-read data off the disk.
2 - the WIndows 10 upgrade then goes MUCH faster.
3 - The customer is happy because they are getting a much faster and more reliable computer.
If they have large amounts of data on the hard disk (as you would have) I would back that up and use that hard disk as a secondary storage device.
I dont know where you heard that the new disk needs to be bigger. With the software method it can actually be smaller (I do plenty of 1 terabyte to 250GB SSD transfers). You cant do this method with the disk duplicator however - the new disk needs to be the same size or bigger.
So if I were you I would be replacing the main disk with a Samsung EVO 860 500GB (or better if you can afford it, a 1 terabyte). Samsungs disk migration software is the best and can handle partition-related issues better than most software. Do all your "Work-In-Progress" off the new C: drive (the SSD). Use the old disk for archiving.
That's what I do anyway.
I hope that helps you - feel free to ask any questions.
regards, Kelvin
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