Quick question about ssd cloning

[Sonikku]

I just cloned my old Crucial SSD over to my new Samsung 970 evo NVME drive. The question is, is there any loss in speed or efficiency that results from plopping an old drive's old install data onto a new NVME drive versus making a clean install of Windows 10 on the NVME in the first place?

 

[Billy Tallis]

There shouldn't be any partition alignment or sector size issues cloning from a source that's already a SSD. On some NVMe drives, there is a very small efficiency gain to be had by switching the drive from 512-byte sectors to 4kB sectors (and that requires a clean install to a new filesystem), but the 970 EVO doesn't support 4k sectors so that doesn't matter in your case.

Depending on how you cloned the drive, it's possible that the unused space on the drive was copied in addition to the actual file contents and metadata. In that case, it might help a bit to TRIM the free space:

PS C:\>Optimize-Volume -DriveLetter C -ReTrim -Verbose

 

[mikeymikec]

there is a very small efficiency gain to be had by switching the drive from 512-byte sectors to 4kB sectors (and that requires a clean install to a new filesystem)

re: underlined text - I'm not sure if that's true, because back in the days when Advanced Format was a new thing, I formatted an AF drive on XP the normal way without realising that its sector layout had been written in the old way rather than AF and found that write performance tanked. I then used EaseUS Partition Master to re-write the sector layout to the AF type. Problem solved, data intact.

After my recent experience though, I'd doubly recommend backing up that data first if need be 🙂
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/fun-and-games-not-with-drive-cloning-win10.2557474/

 

[Billy Tallis]

I formatted an AF drive on XP the normal way without realising that its sector layout had been written in the old way rather than AF and found that write performance tanked.

That sounds like an alignment problem with a 4k drive that emulated 512B sectors, rather than a drive that actually exposed 4k sectors to the host. Moving data from a 512B drive to a 4k-native drive requires altering every logical block address reference in the filesystem (dividing by 8), and handling any pointers that internally weren't 4k-aligned. I'm not aware of any cloning/imaging tools that can do this.