Cloning to new internal drive

I need to replace the old hard drive in my WinXP computer. My plan has been to clone the old drive to an external hard drive (I use Acronis True Image 11 Home), remove the old drive and replace it with the new one, attach the external drive, boot into True Image with the bootable CD, and then restore from the external drive to the new internal drive.

However, in responding to another issue on a newsgroup, one person said he had used a USB adapter to attach his new internal hard drive to his computer. Then he cloned the old drive directly to the new one, put the new one in place of the old one--and the computer booted up and ran just fine.

Is this method a reasonable one to try?

Thank you!

Jo-Anne