Okay, I'm thinging of switching my laptop HDD out for an SSD when the warrenty expries. I've yet to find out whether it's a 1.8" or 2.5" drive, but that isn't my issue. As the laptop came from Sony, it didn't come with a Windows CD for a fresh install, there's just a hidden 100MB recovery partition on the drive. There's only room for one drive in the laptop. So my plan is to clone the HDD to the SSD and then just switch them out. The question is how do I do that? Can you buy USB caddies for 1.8 or 2.5" drives. If so I can just use Acronis True Image. But if caddies that size aren't available, how can I do it.
1.8" HDD Caddy 2.5" HDD Caddy Just google it, these were the 1st that came up. Also if you have a desktop, you can connect them both up via standard sata cables and clone that way.
As long as they are both 2.5" Sata drives, this will do about 100gb in 1 hour direct from 1 disk to another. Use it at work, works very well. http://www.lindy.co.uk/usb-2-esata-docking-cloning-station-for-25-35-sata-hard-drives/42797.html
I use Acronis True Workstation Echo software each time I need to clone. It's worked every time so far, In Vista and XP. You need the source and target drives both plugged in though, it doesn't back up to an image file, it literally does an on the fly copy. It resizes the partitions on the new HDD too, if the new HDD is larger. It takes a while though, the old drive (200GB) connected to an internal pata and the new drive (500GB) connected using a usb caddy on a PC I did last night took about 3.5 hours to do. There was a total of about 55GB of data across three partitions. I also use Image4Dos at work, which does the trick quite well. Norton Ghost works really well, too. The Acronis software is dead easy though.
That's fine. As long as can just plug the SSD in once the copying has been done, and it boots, I'm happy.
