Cloning Hard-drives?

[Wolf]

Originally Posted by Meeprawr

Slightly off topic

I'm looking to purchase a ssd and I am wondering if it is possible to make an image of my existing seagate sata harddrive, and cloning it onto the ssd. I do not have much data on my primary partition and it would easily fit on a 64/80/128gb ssd

It will work, but unless you manually create a SSD-friendly partition alignment on the HDD first, you won't get the advantage of having an optimal partition alignment offset when you clone the drive to the SSDs. That's because normal cloning programs clone the entire partition, including the existing alignment.

The only way around this is to use a program called drive snapshot after you have already created an aligned partition on the SSD, as it will allow you to backup and restore a drive's data and boot sector without overriding the existing partition.

I don't think the performance hit is huge if you just use a non-optimal alignment, but you should be aware you won't get the best result that way.

Apparently some people have managed to get Acronis to do this, but I couldn't ever get it to work.