Imaging SSD

I'm about to upgrade from my Intel X25M-G2 160GB to a Samsung 470 series 256GB. Since this is an SSD to SSD upgrade, can I safely clone the drive image across and keep the 4K alignment?

 

Acronis TrueImage 2011 software claims to automatically handles the alignment issue when a device is cloned. I've cloned several HDDs to SSDs without any problems.

John

 

Like John said, With Acronis True Image 2011 you can.

 

any full disk cloning would work. the simplest one(if you are not afraid of linux) is :

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

where sda is the old drive, sdb is the new drive.

edit:
BTW, since you have an Intel, you should be able to use the Intel locked Acronis if you prefer that.

 

Thanks guys I think I'll use Acronis. Should have the new drive really soon.

 

I read in the german computermagazine c't issue 9, dated 11. april 2011, that Linux dd copies also the empty sectors.
That means the SSD controller sees that this blocks are occupied which may lead to low write rates.
I don't know if this is true as I have no Linux knowledge.

 

true. dd is just sector to sector copy, it doesn't care or know the semantic meaning of partition or file system. whether it would lead to low write rate, I have no idea. But Acronis may not be much different as it also doesn't understand file system. When you have a partition that goes from LBA 0 to LBA 1000000, it would all be copy over, no matter it is used or not. That is a file system level thing.

On Intel, you can issue a manual TRIM afterward, not sure about other models.

 

I'm using Drive Snapshot in a Win PE environment(Win7RescuePE) for imaging and I'm sure it uses only the filled sectors.

 

If it understand NTFS/FAT sure it can. Windows 7's built in disk imaging also can.

 

This is not a position taken by the Acronis employees on the Acronis forum. It will maintain whatever alignment you start with but it is not "alignment aware."

They hope 2012 will be.

Perry

 

Yes it can. Furthermore it compresses the data very effective. My OS partition of about 12 GB is stored in 6 GB.

 

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@3Fees
Have you tried to create a partition with Partition Wizard? I just did and it creates the primary partition at offset 31 KB -> misalignment for a SSD.
I also didn't find the option to Secure Erase the disk. Do you mean the option "Wipe Disk"? Please show me the option "Secure Erase".