Will True Image Cloning work on the newer SSHD drives?
I'm considering upgrading to the WD 4TB Blue Hybrid Drives ( http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1580 ), but before I do I want to make sure that cloning will work on it, since I use cloning as my backup method.
I've searched the forums but only found this post about cloning not working on an older version of True Image, but there were no responses - https://forum.acronis.com/forum/98706 .
I have used different SSHD's and imaging and restoring works fine, but I have never used the clone feature on any drive. One issue you may run into though, regardless of drive type is when you attempt to clone to a drive with different sector sizes. Most drives 2TB and smaller use 512Kb sector size. Most drives above 2TB use 4K sector size. Cloning will not work in this case if trying to clone from one drive to another if the sector size is different. If cloning to drives with similar sector size, it should work though, regardless if it is an SSHD, SSD, or standard HD.
On a personal note about SSHD's, I avoid them now after bad experience with peformance. They do work well for boot and shutdown operations and recurring tasks, but they can actually be much slower in real world performance - especially if the drive is 5400RPM. The onboard cache is just too small and can quickly fill up during large reads and/or writes. When the cache fills up, the drive can be slower than a regular spinning drive of the same speed because the caching area beomes a bottleneck that slows down the read/writes before they get to the mechanical interface.
Thanks for the info. I had read about the WD version of True Image, but was hoping to hear from someone with experience that it did indeed work after that one post I found. But if WD has it on their website, I'm going to assume it will work just fine then.
I didn't realize the sector size would be different and that cloning then wouldn't work. I always buy 2 drives the same size, so once set up, cloning would work since the drives would have the same sectors. But that would mean I'd have to set up everything from scratch instead of being able to clone the existing 2TB to the new 4TB drive, and that's something I really do not want to do again. So if there's really no way around that, I might hold off on this upgrade for now until I have an abundance of free time to set it all up again, or when I'm also upgrading the motherboard and CPU.
In the meantime I'm also going to check on the performance issue you ran into. I don't care if the boot up time is faster or not, I rarely reboot my computers other than for required updates, but slower performance during continued use would be a problem for me. Thanks for tossing that info in there, I just might steer clear of the hybrid drives then.
Thank you both for the info, much appreciated.
Niki, you should be able to do a normal backup from the old drive and a restore to the new SSHD drive instead of doing a clone from one to the other. The restore should take care of correct sector sizes.
You wll need to have a third drive to store the backup on with this approach but would assume you may already have this for the purpose of keeping backups with your existing setup.
I have a 1TB SSHD in my laptop and have to agree with Bobbo that I haven't seen any great performance benefit in having it, but was influenced at the time by the thought of having the faster SSD component alongside the higher capacity - especially when looking at the cost of a high capacity pure SSD drive.
I've only ever used the cloning on True Image since I always have 2 drives and if anything goes belly-up, I just change the boot drive and I'm back in business in a few minutes. As long as there is a way to transfer the entire disk with all OS files, then I'll probably go ahead with the upgrade, but stay away from the hybrid drives.
Thanks for the help.