I've done many many many clones, and have never been asked.

Anyways, top tip to people who have to re-activate Windows, if you use the first option (connect to the internet), and it barfs, use the phone activation method, it's a pain, but eventually it'll ask you how many machines you have Windows installed on, put 0, or whatever the truthful number is, and it'll then give you the code to activate it.

Little loophole I've learned over the years.

Same goes with Office

Same here - recently upgraded my SSD in size with no need to revalidate.

When I cloned my friend's platter HD to a new 1 TB SSD, after doing the clone procedure in Acronis, I simply swapped out the drives and restarted the laptop. It burst into action (honestly, that's how fast SSDs are) and there was not, and never has been, any request from Microsoft to activate.

Windows does know that the hard drive has changed. But the policies that require reactivation are not so strict that swapping a drive alone will trigger it. Microsoft uses this information along with many more bits of data on the other hardware in the machine to determine whether the computer is substantially similar. If not, reactivation is required.

Yes, while this is updated in WMI, the point was that it doesn't require reactivation.

The last couple of times I've swapped out a drive I got the "This is not genuine" warning--reactivate and it was happy.

It's been a long time since I've had to do a phone activation. XP used to puke on me so often that I kept having to reinstall and kept having to go through the phone activation. Since XP SP2 I've only had Windows puke badly enough to need a reinstall once. (Most of these, including the latest, was something that freaks out in the device manager and it won't accept any new mass storage devices. This is nasty because it applies to USB devices--sooner or later it would strike even on known devices such as my Kindle.)

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.

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.)

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.)

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.

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.

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...

Few years ago I swapped out a platter hard drive for a ssd from crucial. I won't say that it didn't last long, but the life expectancy was much shorter than anticipated. It was easy enough, and they sell a cloning kit for like $15 that copies everything, and there was no windows activation needed. (Oddly, I could never get web root to work on it again.)

A cheap alternative would be just getting a low profile usb flash drive Amazon has them on sale for a reasonable amount for the size.

The longevity of SSDs has improved dramatically over the last few years, and now approaches (and in the "rough use" arena, definitely exceeds) that of regular "spinny" hard drives. I've been using SSDs exclusively in my laptops for the last 2 years and don't have any intention of going back.

USB flash drives won't offer the same performance as SSDs. Even USB3 isn't as fast as SATA3, and you'll find that the controllers built into flash drives aren't generally as intelligent at I/O operations as SSDs. For example, the flash drive you referenced supports a read speed of 120MB/s while a SATA3 SSD supports up to 550MB/s. That's a very noticeable difference on today's hardware.

I've been using SSDs exclusively [eta: in laptops] for something like 7 years. Longevity has NEVER been an issue for normal use; I've never seen an SSD run out of write lifetime except in truly abusive server workloads -- even in servers, it takes a lot of work to run out of write lifetime. I've never tried running one in a DVR -- that's probably the worst possible consumer use of one, and one where someone using it very heavily (e.g. a security system constantly writing) might have to worry about write lifetime.

The oldest SSD I have (an 80GB Intel X25-M, G1 without trim) is still working. Not really good for much at that size, but still working.

Every single failed SSD I've ever seen has involved a controller failure in some form. Usually of the catastrophic "bricked" variety.

As for write lifetimes, they've actually gotten worse over time rather than better -- newer grades of consumer flash can do many, many fewer writes per cell given the same write patterns. Better DSP algorithms can extend that a bit, and the FTLs have gotten better at avoiding write amplification, so it's not entirely down-hill, but it's all entirely irrelevant: to completely wear out even a "short lived" drive, you'd need to rewrite the whole drive 3x a day, every day, for a year.

Unless you're moving multi-gigabyte files around, that's really not a noticeable difference; nor will most people notice the difference in speed between running an SSD on 3Gbps SATA vs 6Gbps SATA. the random-access performance makes a much bigger difference; that said, even the fastest dedicated USB disks I've seen (and the Lexar P20 is pretty nice!) are pretty miserable for that.

I've got an old 160GB Intel X25-M in a USB3 enclosure as my knockaround drive, and it would be almost tolerable as a bootable drive in a pinch, but the USB overhead is still kind of a killer. For moving bulk files, the ~150-200MB/sec read and write speed is more than fast enough for anything -- it's faster than the gigabit ethernet I'd otherwise be using.