Cloning hard drive how? and worth it?

[omi]

Got a new seagate 7200.10 to increase my storage space. I have an old 7200.8 hard disk as well.

I was just planning to use the new 7200.10 as for storage but if its a faster drive why not move my OS WinXP pro and program files to it.

so 2 main questions

1) will i actually see an noticeable benefits from doing so?

7200.10 16mb buffer over the 7200.8 8mb buffer

or will it all be theoretically or 1% difference etc?

2) how do i do it cheap and easily? it looks like i have to buy norton ghost or partition magic which doesnt appeal to me if I am going to use it once.

the only free method google turned up was "dd" which involves some sort of unix boot disk and huge potential to go wrong.

Thanks in advance

 

[LadFromWales]

the Seagate 7200.10's are supposed to be a lot faster due to its perpendicular recording...I don't see a difference between 8 and 16MB, 2 and 8MB though...

If you don't to purchase a disk mirroring application, or find other ways of obtaining it, you could always just go through the process or reinstalling windows, and just copy over whatever you need from the old drive to the new

DD can do the job for you, but as you mentioned, if you input the incorrect commands, you can potentially kill off your partition table or write over the data. Plus it will probably take as long as it would for you to just reinstall, lol.