I won't disagree, or agree. If you are running spinning rust rather than an SSD, you are getting exactly what you chose. Just about any use case that justifies spinning rust can be solved with an external platter, thumbdrive, and/or SD card.
When I upgraded from 7 to 10 I had an SSD in my machine but was never given an option to install 10 to the SSD. It requires some contortions to get physical install media and then start over on a new install on the SSD instead of doing any kind of convenient system migration.
The "choice" I made was back in 2009 when I installed 7 to an HDD, which seems like a reasonable choice.
Resize and clone the install from the HDD to the SSD. I've had the same "install" of Windows since 2011, its gone through 3 different storage mediums, two different motherboards, and three different CPUs.
My go-to for a low level copy between two different drives is Clonezilla.
On the PC I described above I have added and removed several additional hard drives over the years as I expand and they die. Recently I had my old Nvidia graphics card die and replaced it with an ATI.
I uninstalled the nvidia drivers then installed the ATI ones and it seems to work fine. No activation complaints.
It's actually been very easy to keep this thing running. Pretty much just plug in new parts when old ones fail. I think my spinning rust HDD is about to die though so I should take the suggestions in this thread and go through the process of moving the OS to the SSD.
At some point in the distant past I might have replaced a Core 2 Duo for a Core 2 Quad. Or I may have built it this way, not sure.
When I've done this, on first boot Windows detects the changed hardware and there's a little mini-installation screen that says "Reconfiguring Hardware" or something. Things seem to work afterwards. Changing the Motherboard may cause activation issues on OEM licenses. Changing from Nvidia GPUs to other manufacturers may require e.g. DDU to remove their drivers completely.
I have never had an issue installing Windows 10 to a machine I upgraded to an ssd…I had hell with an old Dell Precision workstation because of the built in RAID controller…but that’s another story…and when I upgraded that machine to W7 from XP 64 bit, I bought new spinning rust for it. But W8 went smooth and I got W10 working by disabling the RAID during install (I used an SSD for boot).
That machine, with dual e5405’s is still in service for gaming at my kid’s place.
Physical install media for 10 is a matter of downloading an .exe and selecting the option for making a thumb drive as the installation disk and then booting from it.
It’s relatively straight forward but there are a few moving parts for sure. Typically f12 to select boot device.
This was the "free" upgrade to 10 from 7. It only offered in-place upgrades. I didn't want to go through the pain of an actual fresh install. I don't really understand why Microsoft couldn't (didn't) give the option to install to a new drive while upgrading.
The upgrade is still free…or at least they still are for me in the US as recently as earlier this year…I have an old Vostro that gets so little use it is faster to reinstall W10 from scratch than upgrade.
The same was true for the old Precision workstation a couple of years ago when I gave it to my kid.
And several other machines including a Win7 Thinkpad off eBay.
My advice is download the installation tool and give it a try.
Backup first as needed of course.
Think of all the complaints Microsoft avoids by keeping Windows 10 available without a bunch of time, money, and rigmarole.
