Can cloning a hard disk drive to a SSD drive physically damage the SSD or the performance of the SSD

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I have a new SSD drive, I want to use it to replace the old mechanical hard disk drive in a laptop.

The laptop had a new O/S (Windows 7 64-bit) installed about 9 months ago and I want to know if it's worth the effort to reinstall the O/S or if I can just clone the old HDD.

I have read discussions about differences between platter alignments in the HDD and memory/data pages in the SSD. I believe you can reconfigure the SSD to handle the problem of platter/page alignment, but even so the advice is coming down on the side of a reinstall because:

Cloning can cause a misconfigured SSD and thus not achieve the
maximum performance boost I am looking for.
The misconfiguration is actually damaging to the SSD and will result in a reduced lifetime.

Is there quantified measure of the expected performance degradation for cloning (with or without reconfiguration)?

Is there a quantified measure of the any possible damage to the SSD and the reduction in its lifetime?

Best Answer

It would seem that this would not be an issue. Kingston, for example, includes software in their kit to clone the drive. They state "For notebook or desktop users, switching to SSD or adding it to your system is simple with upgrade kits that include everything you need as well as software to clone your files and OS in just minutes. Kingston SSDNow drives are backed by a three-year warranty, live 24/7 tech support and legendary Kingston reliability."

Intel also offers a tool to manage the drive as well.

Intel says about their Data Migration Software "Download this free utility to help you install an Intel SSD in an existing PC system. With minimal steps, this useful tool replicates the operating system and all files from a PC’s hard drive or SSD to any Intel SSD. The Intel Data Migration Software supports Microsoft Windows* 7, Vista*, and XP"

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Linux Hard Disk Load – How to Monitor Hard Disk Load on Linux

You can get a pretty good measure of this using the iostat tool.

% iostat -dx /dev/sda 5

Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s   rsec/s   wsec/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await  svctm  %util
sda               0.78    11.03    1.19    2.82    72.98   111.07    45.80     0.13   32.78   1.60   0.64

The disk utilisation is listed in the last column. This is defined as

Percentage of CPU time during which I/O requests were issued to the device (band-width utilization for the device). Device saturation occurs when this value is close to 100%.

Problems cloning a hard drive

I've done something very similar with diskparted and gparted from sysresccd. Sole spoiler is that it backs up/restores only partitions one by one. But the MBR can be saved as well, so no problems. Bonus: very easily "scriptable" by commandline, in case you need to do that more often, or want to make an "unattended" or "businesstrip" rescue cd.

Attention: gparted has a "round to cylinders" checkbox (checked by default) when creating the empty partition. In my install, I had to uncheck this and let the first (Vista's) partition start at 1 instead of 0 (if I recall correctly, but you will see).
If you forget to uncheck that, you will not have the possibility to uncheck it when you try to resize/relocate the partition afterwards. To have the partition start at 1 was mandatory for Vista.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux Hard Disk Load – How to Monitor Hard Disk Load on Linux

Problems cloning a hard drive

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