HD Cloning - Macrium or Acronis?

ThisIsWeird

Hi. Cloning a HDD to an SSD before swapping them. Both the above progs are, I'm sure, very capable, and I have used Macrium a few times in the past. However, I also recall some confusion over partition sizes and stuff when the drives are different volumes, so wonder if one is easier to follow than t'other?

The HDD is a 500GB Seagate, currently showing 314GB free of 421GB (where's the rest gorn?) The replacement is a Samsung EVO 250GB (she won't require much additional storage space.)

How straightforward will this be to clone? How easy will it be to chose partition sizes and all that malarkey?

Ta.

vacheron

Samsung provides data migration tools to do this (providing it detects that the new destination drive is a Samsung. I've used it 3-4 times and it had always worked flawlessly.

I want to say "Magician" is the name of their software, but could be mistaken.

jshm2

Neither. Clonezilla or Hasleo Disk Clone as both are faster and free.

flaneurs_lobster

vacheron said:

Samsung provides data migration tools to do this (providing it detects that the new destination drive is a Samsung. I've used it 3-4 times and it had always worked flawlessly.

I want to say "Magician" is the name of their software, but could be mistaken.

Correct. Worked just fine on my last (and only) HDD --> SSD migration.

Neil_Jones

ThisIsWeird said:

The HDD is a 500GB Seagate, currently showing 314GB free of 421GB (where's the rest gorn?)

It hasn't.

If you have another partition of about 55Gb for whatever reason then your 500Gb is allocated.

They should both add up to about 465Gb combined.

bob2302

Neil_Jones said:

ThisIsWeird said:

The HDD is a 500GB Seagate, currently showing 314GB free of 421GB (where's the rest gorn?)

It hasn't.

If you have another partition of about 55Gb for whatever reason then your 500Gb is allocated.

They should both add up to about 465Gb combined.

Just to be clear, the manufacture is quoting the size in GB, the OS is displaying the size in GiB, but labelling it as GB. 500GB is 465 GiB.

ThisIsWeird

Ooookkaaay. First attempt at using Samsung's Magician Data Migration was a complete flop.

To start with, it wouldn't even get off it's arris to test the current HDD's Drive Health. It didn't have the decency to say it couldn't be bovvered, it didn't have the decency to say "Sorry - let me explain why..."; it just sat there scrolling. SCROLLING! How long should I let it SCROLL for, EH?

That left me having to Google what's going on.

Pitiful.

So then I jumped to 'Data Migration', and here it wouldn't let me 'Select' the partition to migrate, and it wouldn't list the plugged-in (via a USB thingy) Samsung SSD.

Double-pitiful.

This is what I mean. This should be a walk in t'park, so why isn't it?

Anyhoo, looks like I'm going to have to use Macrium (unless anyone says differently*), so my Q there will be - how do I move 109GB of the existing C: drive to the new 250GB SSD? What do I need to 'say' to Macrium so's it clones the 109, and leaves the rest available as normal storage?

Ta.

* Priority is ease of use. :-)

jshm2

Use Clonezilla, mate. 

HillStreetBlues

jshm2 said:

Use Clonezilla, mate. 

AFAIK would need to shrink original drive.

vacheron

ThisIsWeird said:

Ooookkaaay. First attempt at using Samsung's Magician Data Migration was a complete flop.

To start with, it wouldn't even get off it's arris to test the current HDD's Drive Health. It didn't have the decency to say it couldn't be bovvered, it didn't have the decency to say "Sorry - let me explain why..."; it just sat there scrolling. SCROLLING! How long should I let it SCROLL for, EH?

That left me having to Google what's going on.

Pitiful.

So then I jumped to 'Data Migration', and here it wouldn't let me 'Select' the partition to migrate, and it wouldn't list the plugged-in (via a USB thingy) Samsung SSD.

Double-pitiful.

This is what I mean. This should be a walk in t'park, so why isn't it?

Anyhoo, looks like I'm going to have to use Macrium (unless anyone says differently*), so my Q there will be - how do I move 109GB of the existing C: drive to the new 250GB SSD? What do I need to 'say' to Macrium so's it clones the 109, and leaves the rest available as normal storage?

Ta.

* Priority is ease of use. :-)

The issue may be that it seems you are trying to clone the new SSD while it is installed in a USB caddy. This will prevent have the new SSD from reading a lot of the SMART data the way it would over a SATA port. (I assume that is is a SATA rather than an M.2 interface)? It will also need to set up the new drive as a system partition and set that partition as bootable.

Can you install both drives in the computer simultaneously using a SATA lead rather than having one in a USB caddy?

As your source drive is also a 2.5" unit I am guessing that it may be a laptop, so possibly not?

As others have said, you may need to reduce your original disk partition size first in order to do a direct clone of your older and larger drive onto your newer, smaller drive, but IIRC, Magician can do this too.

bob2302

vacheron said:

The issue may be that it seems you are trying to clone the new SSD while it is installed in a USB caddy. This will prevent have the new SSD from reading a lot of the SMART data the way it would over a SATA port. (I assume that is is a SATA rather than an M.2 interface)? It will also need to set up the new drive as a system partition and set that partition as bootable.

You don't need SMART info to clone a drive. Also a lot of USB -SATA chipsets do support SMART these days.