Drive Cloning

[Blues]

This is a personal issue as I haven't come to a case where a paid job would involve some shortcuts and recycling. My wife's PC has a HDD and I want to "upgrade" to an SSD. It is an older model laptop I hope to replace eventually but for now I just want to fix the one issue I hear about often which is slowness which every time I look at it is due to disk usage hitting 100%. I am fairly certain this is a HDD vs SSD issue so my concern is in that the laptop has a 1TB drive and my only SSD on hand is a 500GB and I have never cloned to a downsized drive. I believe she setup her PC with a MS account so I also believe it is probable that bitlocker and drive encryption are enabled and on.

So...
#1 Should I expect any issue with downsizing the drive as the actual data is less than 500GB total
#2 Will I have any issue with drive encryption in this job
#3 What cloning software might yall recommended for this job

 

[britechguy]

1. I have never had any issue with cloning to a smaller drive provided the data fits and the cloning software supports that. (Nor have I had any difficulty when going to an upsized drive, either).

2. You need to determine whether it's even on, first. Open a command prompt and enter: manage-bde -status C:

3. If the SSD maker supplies you with something, that's what I try first. Most do.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Same with Bri,
We usually use a hardware appliance to clone drives..it's fastest, but..it will not downsize. For downsizing we use software apps, usually we have the latest "free download" from drive manufacturers, most of them use a tweaked version of Acronis.

Works great. Have not had issues downsizing, if you go from a 1TB drive with 350 gigs data to a 500 gig SSD....no problem!

As for encryption...if it's on, decrypt first. Some "clone while within Windows" apps can clone an encrypted drive I've read, since they clone while the computer is booted up from the host drives environment. I've not used those.

 

[thecomputerguy]

EaseUS cloning will clone to a smaller drive and so will Macrium I think.

But honestly ... just buy a 1TB samsung SSD it's not even that much more money than a 500GB and the software Samsung offers is really good most of the time.

 

[britechguy]

But honestly ... just buy a 1TB samsung SSD

Why bother if you have a 500GB SSD on hand for a user who is only using significantly less than that (and, based upon who's asking, I'd presume there's every reason to believe that the volume of data is probably pretty stable, overall)? I could have sworn that a figure just above 300 GB was mentioned earlier, but I must be inventing that out of the whole cloth, as it's not in the original message.

Excess capacity is a dead asset, if you can call it an asset at all.

Samsung Magician is a nice tool, though.

 

[nlinecomputers]

1. I have never had any issue with cloning to a smaller drive provided the data fits and the cloning software supports that. (Nor have I had any difficulty when going to an upsized drive, either).

2. You need to determine whether it's even on, first. Open a command prompt and enter: manage-bde -status C:

3. If the SSD maker supplies you with something, that's what I try first. Most do.

1. As long as you use a good program you can downsize. Most programs will require you to manually edit the sizes of partitions but that is easy on most programs.

2. You should turn this OFF before ANY clone for any reason. Then re-enable if the client wants/needs it. Most clients will decline.

3. Macrium Reflect.

 

[britechguy]

You should turn this OFF before ANY clone for any reason.

I want to make completely clear that I agree, unreservedly, with all who have said that BitLocker/Device Encryption should be TURNED OFF prior to cloning a drive.

My initial comment was aimed at determining whether it was a factor to begin with, which was unknown. If it's not on already, you're good to go as is; if it is on, then it needs to be disabled with the following command: manage-bde -off C:

 

[Computer Bloke]

For added peace of mind you could easily resize the partition(s) on the old drive to ensure that nothing hangs over the 500GB mark before cloning it. Then you don't have to rely on your cloning software to be clever.

Backup first, of course. Domestics can get messy.

 

[britechguy]

Then you don't have to rely on your cloning software to be clever.

Not that your approach is not equally valid, but for myself, I'd rather rely on the cloning software to be clever than repartitioning the original drive unless necessary. Modern cloning software tends to be very clever indeed, about multiple things, and that's what I love about it.

 

[fincoder]

For added peace of mind you could easily resize the partition(s) on the old drive to ensure that nothing hangs over the 500GB mark before cloning it.

Backup first, of course.

You'd get more peace of mind by leaving the original drive untouched, then you have the ultimate backup. No point doing a system image backup just so you can shrink the partition and then clone...

Partition-shrinking during the clone operation leaving the original drive untouched is quicker and safer. I use Paragon for cloning because it never fails, Macrium Reflect is much faster but the clone fails more often. Both of these will clone to smaller drive.

 

[britechguy]

Partition-shrinking during the clone operation leaving the original drive untouched is quicker and safer.

My feelings, exactly. The probability of the original media failing when being read for the purpose of cloning is no higher than it is when being read for the purpose of backing up. A clone is a backup, of a very specific type.

That's why I prefer to allow the cloning software to handle any partition resizing strictly on the drive that's being cloned to. The original remains exactly as it was when the clone started.

 

[Diggs]

Excess capacity is a dead asset,

Sorry, don't mean to stray from topic but don't modern SSD drives rotate data through the unused space spreading reads and writes throughout the drive giving longer life?

 

[britechguy]

Sorry, don't mean to stray from topic but don't modern SSD drives rotate data through the unused space spreading reads and writes throughout the drive giving longer life?

There is leveling/distribution done, but it's certainly not worth considering very much as far as lifespan of an SSD goes. Particularly for a home user.

Buying a 1TB drive for someone with well under 500GB of data, and where a 500GB drive still leaves plenty of spare space (both for user data and OS use), is money wasted, in my opinion. Just like packing your random home user's machine with 32GB plus of RAM is.

If what you're doing routinely, and will be doing routinely, does not exploit a given resource it's a dead asset. And Windows manages RAM much better now than it did when I started using Windows (all OSes do).

 

[Blues]

The spare drive is a Crucial 500GB SSD the HDD in her PC last I looked was around 250GB she did offload her phones pictures recently so might be closer to 300GB now and I have a NAS in the house to further offload data like that if space becomes an issue. I don't want to invest much into the machine I hope to replace it soon but to alleviate complaints every couple days or weeks depending on frequency of use I want to do something. I agree with the shrink on clone and leave original alone has been my plan from that start as I want it as untouched as possible to maintain a good fallback as there is no problem outside of a common well known and documented performance issue with HDDs primarily on Win 10 and I'm not sure there are any Win 11 still using HDD but I suspect its vulnerable to it too.

To go along with the unused assets top it off in this case with the fact that the performance is so much worse than one with less unused assets so any value one might want to tie to them you have to recognize the value of the improved performance far exceeds the value you might place on those potentially available assets.