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I recently bought a solid state drive. Not wanting the hassle of transferring windows from the old drive to it, I reinstalled a separate copy of windows onto it and bought a useful little unit from China which allows you to power up to six SATA disk dives (SSD of HDD) individually.

It cost me £20 and allows me to boot up from either - or another old drive I happened to have - by deselecting the others before switch on. Once the machine has booted up, you can switch on the other drives and access files from them as you wish. Took me about 30 minutes to install in a spare bay.

It saves a lot of hassle trying to reinstall software and copy data etc. if you are thinking of upgrading to a new disc.

Please put a link up so we can see what you mean

It's no hassle at all. You put both drives into a machine and clone the old one onto the new using something like Acronis True Image or a Linux live CD, then take the old drive out and boot off the new - bingo, everything transferred, working exactly as it was, no need to re-install anything.

I did this with my Windows 7 system last week, moving from a 128GB SSD to a 256GB. Put both drives in the PC, booted a Linux CD and did

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=64k

The copy took about 5 min. Switched off, unplugged the old drive, powered on and the new drive booted straight into Windows.

Another way to do it is to copy a mirror image on to a external hard drive, fit your new drive reinstall windows to the new drive and then use a boot disk to install the mirror image on to the computer. you can make your own boot disk by going into windows back up.

Yes, I would like to see also.
How does it power up all those hard drives?

It is a thing about the size of a disc drive with illuminated push buttons on the front. It comes with a set of cables. there are six connections from it to up to six drives, and an input which accepts power from the cable that originally supplied the disk.

You can power up any or all of them as you see fit.

The reason I didn't want to clone the disc is that it has been less than successful when I've tried it in the past. Also the SSD is smaller capacity than the HDD I used before and I couldn't be bothered to go through thousands of files deciding what I wanted to transfer and what I didn't. This is - in my case - a much better way of doing things.

I can't find the site I bought mine from, but its like one of these sold by Amazon except it has six pushbuttons not four. It seemed wise to buy more than I really need. You obviously need a motherboard with at least six SATA drives to take advantage of this though.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/ORICO-HD-PW4101-Drive-Switch-Controller/dp/B005NVU1S2

There is a button on there in the middle to select 6 drives. As you say, ideal if you have 6 sata drives and a motherboard that will take them. I have ide so it would be a pain to swop the ribbon cables over.