Originally Posted by
linsj
I figured out I need to download a program like EaseUS (is there something better that's also free?) and buy a drive enclosure and cable to connect the drives. Any recommendations for a cheap enclosure? Do they typically come with a cable?
Best free alternative:
http://clonezilla.org/downloads.php
(Not exactly user-friendly, though!)
Second-best free alternative: Windows disk image backup. (requires a third drive since it's "make backup from original to backup drive, restore backup to new drive from backup drive") MUCH, MUCH more user-friendly.
Originally Posted by
Loren Pechtel
I've never seen an enclosure that didn't come with a cable.
I've seen a very few very cheap ones that didn't, but it's extremely unusual (and if you're getting the typical $15-$20 ones rather than the $5-$8 "direct from Asia" ones, I've never seen them not come with a cable, either.)
Originally Posted by
Loren Pechtel
Straight over duplication only works if the drives are identical. You need software if you need to change the volume size and you might need it even with matching drives if you have an old format that isn't SSD-aligned. Having it out of alignment will not stop keep it from working but it will cost you performance.
SSD alignment is only an issue on older OSes; new installs of 8/8.1/10 will use 1MB alignment even on disks. I think that's true for Windows 7 as well.
Also, Windows (since Vista) can expand a volume in-place in many cases*, in which case the volume just has to be equal size* or bigger
(* the main limit is that if you're still running the manufacturer image, you usually can't move the recovery volume out of the way.
** note that there is some variation in drives with the same published capacity, so I would not bet on two "500gb" or "512gb" actually being exact to within a few megabytes/thousands of sectors, but any 512gb drive should be bigger than any 500gb drive.)
Originally Posted by
linsj
Loren, I'm getting an SSD that is larger than the current HDD. So it sounds like I need to skip cloning since the drive sizes aren't the same.
Third party cloning software will typically handle this for you; Windows image backup will handle the alignment issues but not the resizing (which may be trivial to fix after cloning, depending on the partition layout on your machine)... Unless you know what "dd" is, this is
probably not a big deal.
Does installing Windows on a different drive present a problem with Microsoft?
It may require re-activation, which in the worst case requires an annoying phone call of punching in touch tone numbers. Not a big deal.
Originally Posted by
Loren Pechtel
Cloning software can handle the different drive sizes. I was saying a dock capable of drive duplication couldn't handle this case.
Depends on the cloning device; we had ones a couple of jobs ago that would do re-sizing and even change SIDs on Windows 2000/XP. Old enough that the annoying embedded OS they ran had to have a serial cable to change settings...