I'm thinking of making the jump to a SSD at the same time I finally upgrade my rig to Windows 7. I sort of have some reliability concerns, since I hate doing a reinstall. I was thinking of getting an 80gb or thereabouts SSD and using my current 250gb as a backup and additional files storage drive. Then I would periodically do a clone to image and save the entire SSD drive image onto the 250gb drive. That way if the SSD went down or something I could be back up and running pretty quickly. I gather it might not be so simple when imaging this way though. Is that true? Also, I'd like to run visual studio 2010 and it seems to aggressively create database files for intellisense on my work PC (for c++ anyway). Is that an application I should avoid running on a SSD?
You can do a simple clone but the sector alignment may be off. It will work but your throughput will be less than ideal. Google will provide you with all the tools, info and utilities to make a decision if the decrease in performance from cloning vs. a fresh install will be acceptable to you.
I know from personal experience that Acronis 2010 and later preserve 4k alignment and would do what the OP wants it to do.
I have created/restored with Acronis and have been fine with alignment but I've never altered a partition will doing it.
I've used Intel's SSD Data migration tool (based on Acronis) to clone partitions from SSD->HDD and from HDD-> SSD without any issues. There was no performance hit as evidenced by results from Crystaldiskmark after the cloning process.
I cloned a HDD from a laptop to a SSD, which resized from 500GB down to 120GB, and it worked fine. Alignment was kept in tact and everything booted without a hitch. This was done this past Saturday.
How can someone tell if alignment is correct after cloning to a SSD? Is it only possible to determine from performance tests, or is there a utility that can perform this check? Thanks.
Google for it. It's free from Intel as long as you have an Intel SSD (won't install otherwise). If you have at least one Intel SSDs in your system, then you can use the utility however you want...even if it is to clone non-Intel SSDs/HDDs.
Cool. I'm not familiar with Acronis. Does the tool support creating a image file from a disk and writing to NTFS partitions? I assume so, but I'd rather be able to do that then just drive to drive cloning.
Yes it does. You can also check alignment of any drive quickly by opening up AS-SSD. http://www.alex-is.de/PHP/fusion/downloads.php?cat_id=4 As long as the lettering (e.g. 103424K - OK) is green, you're properly aligned for best SSD performance.
Thanks for the information guys. I'm thinking of getting an Intel one because of the acronis software and the fact they seem to be considered pretty reliable. I was looking at the 320 series on newegg and amazon. Any opinions on those?
I used acronis on my initial clone as well. There is no way to verify that you are not suffering a performance hit unless you have a fresh install to compare with. I didn't think I was either until SunnyD convinced me to do a fresh install and performance was much improved. You wouldn't know based on pure benchmark numbers alone as they were quite similar, but the overall responsiveness was much better and load times were drastically reduced.
