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[6233638]

I was wondering if anyone here had recommendations for moving to a new SSD.
 
While I know the new M.2 drives offer better performance, and I do plan on upgrading my PC in the near future to something that should support those, when buying another couple of 4TB disks today I was able to get an excellent deal on a 512GB SSD, and I plan on replacing my old 120GB boot drive with it.
 
I have Acronis True Image, which I think will clone to the new disk, but I'm a bit wary of simply copying the data over to the new drive using that. I've heard that there can be issues with things like sector alignment if you simply clone an SSD.

[glynor]

Any modern Imaging application will handle it correctly.  And, that generally only matters with older OSes like Windows XP.

If you're unhappy with TrueImage, though, I can (again) strongly recommend Macrium Reflect.  It can clone the OS drive while the system is running.   

[Hendrik]

I must be getting old for never even considering such a thing, and just reinstalling the OS.....

[6233638]

I must be getting old for never even considering such a thing, and just reinstalling the OS.....

I was thinking just the opposite; I must be getting old because I can't be bothered reinstalling and reconfiguring everything again.
That's the one thing I really like about OSX rather than Windows; there's no registry and all you need to do is move your user folder to another drive, wipe the OS, move it back and 99% of your applications are in the state they were before you reinstalled.
 
And these days I always seem to forget to deactivate and reinstall something, requiring emails/phone calls too. Online activation for software is such a pain.
 

Any modern Imaging application will handle it correctly.  And, that generally only matters with older OSes like Windows XP.

Yeah, it does seem like Windows is a lot more resilient these days, I'm just used to the days when making almost any hardware change meant you were better off reinstalling everything.
 
I had heard that there were issues with sector alignment, but I guess most utilities take that into account now.

[dtb300]

Recently cloned a 64gb SSD to a 128gb SSD using CloneZilla and Win7 - No issues.   Before switching to 2012R2, I had used CloneZilla with Win8 and Win8.1 with no issues cloning or making an image of the SSD.

[6233638]

Well if it's of interest to anyone:
 
120GB Patriot Wildfire:


This was a first-generation SATA III drive, and at least according to the reviews I read, this was the fastest performing drive I could get at the time (2011) and it used additional lower capacity chips to increase parallelism (thus performance) rather than fewer high density chips.
Typically the lower capacity SSDs perform worse, but Patriot did this to keep performance high across the entire range.
 
It was about 80% full when tested there, and recently TRIMed.
 
 
512GB SanDisk X210:

 
Very impressed with this performance since it cost me roughly the same as the Patriot Wildfire did back in 2011.
 
Yes, it's not the latest drive (they just announced the X300) and M.2 will be faster, but I'm sick of constantly shifting games on and off my boot drive, and it seemed to be a very good price for an enterprise-class drive.
 
Checking the store I bought it from now (a friend asked if they were still doing the deal) it does seem that the price for SSDs is just generally lower than I thought it was, and it seems that I had restricted my search to only include enterprise-class drives which made this look like a better deal (I could have paid about $90 more for a consumer-grade Intel) but I'm happy with this.

[glynor]

For the record, if anyone is interested in Macrium Reflect (and you should be, if you're a nerd): Tech Report has an interesting deal right now where if you are a TR subscriber, you can get 20% off anything you order, except the Family Pack for some odd reason, from Macrium.

http://techreport.com/blog/26611/tr-subscribers-get-macrium-reflect-for-20-40-off

What's interesting is that, TR's subscription model is a user-pays-what-they-want model.  So, conceivably, you could subscribe for a one time $1 subscription, and still get 20% off Macrium products.  That's kinda a jerk move, and TR is awesome (probably my second-favorite website after Interact), but there you go.

[6233638]

I ended up doing a clean install, but I'll keep that in mind.

[WinoOutWest]

also FWIW I just migrated a small Win7 ssd to a large Samsung 840 SSD.  The included Samsung Magician tool was easy peasy.  Migrated the OS in tact and without issue.