Ways of Cloning a Drive?

[DemonDragonJ]

One of my computers has a 256-gigabyte solid-state drive, and I wish to replace that drive with a 512-gigabyte SSD, but I do not wish to reinstall the operating system and all of the other software on it, so I shall instead directly copy all the data from one drive to the other. What is the best method for doing that? What can anyone recommend for drive cloning software or another method of cloning a drive?

[Airbozo]

clonezilla (http://clonezilla.org/)

I've used it for multiple OS's in a production environment. Can clone single drives or as many computers as you can put on a network all at the same time. Plus it's free.

[TheMainMan]

:stupid:

Quite simply it is the Swiss Army knife of drive cloning. It works at a drive geometry level so it bypasses most of the issues Windows based tools have. It can be a little intimidating if you're not used to command line or Linux-based tools but the default settings cover most of the basic scenarios well. Take the extra time to ensure your source and target are correct, otherwise it's one of the most reliable tools I use at work.

[Konrad]

+1 clonezilla

Alas, my ancient version of Norton Ghost is far too slow on TB capacities and it just can't handle the complexities of involved in some modern partitions and file systems. Still my all-time fave after over a decade of use. And I still use it when I want to attempt extraction/hacking of the contents of firmware-level hidden drive partitions. But clonezilla faster and better for ~98% of my actual drive cloning needs, lol.

[DemonDragonJ]

Thank you, everyone, for the advice; it seems that Clonezilla is very popular, so I shall certainly consider it for my transfer.

Also, the drive that I currently have is a Samsung 840 pro, which I purchased when their prices were still fairly high, and I shall be replacing it with a Samsung 850 pro, so will Samsung's SSD magician software work in this situation?

[Konrad]

Samsung RAPID Magician will work with ROG RAMDisk - although keeping them both happy can be a pain whenever (seemingly unrelated) drivers get installed/updated - magnificent performance when they both work, finicky problems and many restarts whenever Windows or Windows Update starts messing around with your system.

There's often problems running Magician on the latest-and-greatest new motherboards and operating systems. It takes a while for Samsung to catch up with current chipsets, they've *finally* managed to get Magician running properly on Win10 and Z170, lol.
Magician will work best when used in the chipset-integrated (Intel PCH) SATA ports, many people complain about performance and reliability issues caused by Magician running on chipset-addon (ASMedia, etc) SATA ports.
Magician is still a bit buggy (after a year or so?) on Samsung 950/etc drives, getting it to run stable on SATA is easy but on PCIe/M.2/NVMe it's still a complete hit or a complete miss, at least on the high-end enthusiast/gaming luxury mobos.
Magician does work with RAID. But performance gains on a striped RAID0 (my dual-850PRO and quad-850PRO systems, anyways) are underwhelming because the drives already consistently saturate SATA bandwidths, while redundant reliability on a mirrored RAID1 is greatly (if not entirely) diminished because the software holds caches in volatile memory - indeed, many people claim that a sudden power loss irrecoverably wiped or corrupted their entire file system. (I run Magician, but only on drives which are fully backed up or which can be easily reinstalled from scratch, I wouldn't trust Magician with precious data.)

I would disable Magician (and ROG RAMDisk) while cloning a drive. No need to complicate things.

I wouldn't bother running Magician (or ROG RAMDisk) on a system with <16GB physical RAM; there might be performance gains in some areas, performance losses in others, and it's just an open invitation for a bunch more headaches and tweaking (and possible data loss) which isn't really balanced in my mind against any substantial real-world improvements (unless you're going for new high scores and brag and swag on useless benchmarking metrics).

[d_stilgar]

I've used Macrium Reflect and enjoyed the experience. It was easy enough and I could change partition sizes and clone to a larger or smaller drive (as long as the smaller drive had enough room for all the information obviously).

[richardlawson1489]

Here are some of the successful ways to clone the drive http://www.howtogeek.com/199068/how-to-upgrade-your-existing-hard-drive-in-under-an-hour/ .
Folllow the given seps. This may help you.

[DemonDragonJ]

One of the computers in my house still uses a traditional hard drive, so I plan to soon upgrade it to having a solid-state drive, but I need to decide between two different drives to use.

Should I save money to purchase a Western Digital solid-state drive (https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820250087), or should I spend additional money to purchase a Samsung solid-state drive (https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147361), which is among the best that are currently available? What does everyone else say about that?

[Airbozo]

I think it depends on how you use the system.

Check the endurance (drive writes per day) and see if that helps with the decision. Lightly used systems will be ok with the cheaper drives, while heavily used systems might need that extra endurance.

[DemonDragonJ]

I think it depends on how you use the system.

Check the endurance (drive writes per day) and see if that helps with the decision. Lightly used systems will be ok with the cheaper drives, while heavily used systems might need that extra endurance.

I actually purchased the Samsung drive, because it was discounted, and there was also a promotional code for Cyber Monday, which was too good of a deal to miss. I now have the drive, so I need to wait until I have the free time to perform the operation. This will be for the computer that still has a hard drive, and I shall later purchase a second drive to replace the lower-capacity drive that is currently in my own computer.

I am thinking about using a USB-to-SATA adapter (https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16812400542) for this procedure, which I imagine has its own software; what can anyone say about that?

[DemonDragonJ]

I ultimately used Macrium Reflect (https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree), and it worked flawlessly; the new drive is exactly like the old one, but noticeably faster; the motherboard has only a SATA 2 (3 gbps) interface, but it is still more than sufficiently fast for my mother, who uses the computer primarily to check her e-mail, browse the internet, and perform occasional word processing.

Now that I have seen how effective this software is, I shall eventually use it to upgrade my own computer's 256 GB Samsung 840 pro to a 512 GB Samsung 850 pro, the same model to which I upgraded the other computer.