Today I replaced the last spinning root disk in the house. The media server still has 4x3TB spinning disks, but the old 120GB spinning boot disk has been replaced by a cheap 1 TB SSD. Boot times improved dramatically, and the database access for various things now feels instantaneous.

Process follows, but it’s nothing extraordinary.

1. I shut down the machine
2. Disconnected the four storage drives, just to be careful
3. Connected the new SSD
4. Booted to single user mode
5. Partitioned the new SSD (sdb1 and sdb2, for root and swap)
6. dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1 bs=1M
7. that took about 30 minutes
8. grub-install /dev/sdb
9. e2fsck -f /dev/sdb1
10. resize2fs /dev/sdb1
11. update-grub
12. Double-checked UUIDs from /dev/disks/by-uuid and /boot/grub/grub.cfg
13. shut down the machine
14. unplugged the old root drive, moved the SSD over to that SATA port, reconnected the storage drives
15. power up
16. marvel at the speed of boot, investigate other issues like the ethernet claiming to be flaky (the plug was loose; replugging solved it).