Best utility to copy OS drive to SSD

Flanno · 28 Apr 2010 at 20:33

Mate got a corsair c300 128gig. His C: drive is a 1tb F3 which he is only using 22gb of. He wants to plug in his c300, clone his 22gig of his F3 onto it, and then reboot with the c300. He doesn't want to do a fresh install of Windows 7.

Which is the best software to allow him to achieve what he wants. He is using Intels latest rapid storage tech driver and the intel ich10 controller so
trim should be working.

Thanks

EGuitarStar · 28 Apr 2010 at 20:54

This program is not free but one of the best I have used called Acronis

Broken Hope · 28 Apr 2010 at 21:20

It's a bad idea to clone the the OS with that particular drive unless he can be sure the partition is aligned properly. That drive sees a massive drop in 4k writes on an unaligned partition.

Note these 2 graphs.

http://anandtech.com/show/3667/oczs-agility-2-reviewed-the-first-sf1200-with-mp-firmware/5

MagicBoy · 28 Apr 2010 at 21:28

Would a clone disable TRIM?

Zarf · 28 Apr 2010 at 22:30

Acronis is pretty good. You can align the partition afterwards using gparted on an Ubuntu (or other) live cd ... just uncheck align to cylinder and move/resize the partitions so there is a 1MB gap at the start.

Flanno · 28 Apr 2010 at 22:34

I heard about Acronis and alignment issues allright.

What about this :

1. 1tb drive is only actually 25gig used space (single partition other than the reserved one win7 created) and SSD is 128gig. So use diskmanager to shrink the 1tb drive to say 30gig.

2. Use win7 to create an image of this drive onto another drive (say external drive). So it will only be 30gig max plus the shadow partition.

3. Install SSD, boot of Win7 recovery dvd and restore the 30gig image onto the SSD.

?

Flanno · 29 Apr 2010 at 23:36

So, will my suggestion above work or better off with fresh install ?

jbloggs · 30 Apr 2010 at 02:48

Flanno said:
So, will my suggestion above work or better off with fresh install ?

No, as Win 7 Backup and Restore will only restore a backup to an SSD/HDD the same size or bigger...ie., it goes by HDD/SSD size NOT partition size...

I would just use Acronis trial version to do a clone and then after completed realign SSD part...

unp|dissy · 30 Apr 2010 at 08:54

I'd never clone windows, only linux. Windows is a nightmare with cloning..

I'd give norton ghosta shot if i was forced too..

anything I don't mind · 30 Apr 2010 at 09:14

i just did a fresh install, i said screw it, takes me a few hours. but as long as i have the other install on another hd then i just install the software and overwrite the program files and application data folder from the other drive for each application and it usually goes back to exactly where it was. in the case of utorrent make sure the paths for torrents and downloads are on the same drive letter.