How to copy my old HDD to my new one?

[7beauties]

I'm upgrading to a HDD that uses the new SATA 6GB/s transfers and a motherboard that has SATA 6GB/s connections. I have alot of programs and Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit. How do I copy my old HDD over to my new HDD? Will my old HDD, which is SATA 3GB/s, work with the new motherboard? Or should I just install the new HDD and install everything clean? I also wonder if my Blu-ray Rewriter, which is SATA, will work with the new motherboard. I would appreciate a step-by-step direction in how to copy my old HDD over to my new one. Thank you...

 

[Capt Caveman]

All of your old SATA devices will work.

I have always placed my source and target drives in USB external enclosures, plug them to my laptop and just copied the whole source drive over to the target.