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how do I clone my windows 7 boot hard drive to a OCZ SSD?

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I just bought an OCZ Vertex 4 256gb SSD. I want to use it to replace my boot drive which is a 139gb hard drive. So I want to clone the drive over so my system will now boot off the SSD. It is not clear if any of Acronis products will do this?

My OS is Window 7 Ultimate 64bit

John

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John,

There are two ways to do this and two products to choose from though you will probably be interested in just two of them.

The first would be True Image 2012 which can not only make images of your system but also can perform a direct clone.

The second would be Acronis Migrate Easy which will only perform cloning.

Going with the first choice you could copy your disk in two ways, one way would be to make a complete disk image and then restore it to the new drive, this would necessitate an external intermediary drive to contain the image. Alternatively you could just select the clone option.

Both options allow you to extend the contents of your old drive to use all the extra capacity on your new drive. The advantage of choosing True Image is that you can then make extra scheduled images of your drive should you wish to do so.

If this drive is going into a laptop, with either product you might need to perform a 'reverse clone' where you insert the new drive into your laptop and the old drive is placed in an external caddy.

Migrate Easy I don't believe has been updated recently so might have problems with some drives. Other than that if you only want to clone a drive and never do anything else this is the product for you.

Just to be clear (to other readers) in Acronis speak a Clone and an Image or Backup or different kettles of fish. A Clone is hwere the sectors of the source disk are directly copied to the destination disk the only manipulation that can be done is resizing the existing partitions to fit on the new drive.

An image requires another drive where a container file (a little like a zip or RAR, CAB ) holds the disk sector contents, with this method there are a number of manipulations that can be performed on the contents including scheduling and mounting or exploring of the contents. The file is a compressed file.

A Backup is where just files and folders are contained in a file and again these can be scheduled and explored but not mounted.

Interesting reading. I am about to change my boot drive from a 1TB HDD to an "OCZ Vertex 4 VTX4-25SAT3-512G.M", 512GB SSD. I am only using ~200GB on that HDD so I will have ample space with this 512GB SDD. My OS is Windows 7 Pro x86. (Note: I have two other physical 1TB drives for Data)

Question 1: I have a licensed copy of "Acronis True Image 2011". Do I need to move to "2012" or are your instructions also valid for the 2011 version?

Question 2: You described two methods. Which is best? "Cloning the drive" or Imaging the HDD then Restoring to the SSD?

The instructions above would also cover 2011.

Personally I prefer imaging a drive and then restoring it on most occasions over cloning.

Hmm... OK. So then the process as I understand it would be:

Using Acronis True Image 2011...

- Create an image of my 1TB boot HDD (>> only 220GB used <<) to another drive. I have 2x 1TB physical HDDs I can use.
- Connect the smaller 512GB SSD to my computer and restore the image to that drive. (I assume I can use an external SATA port for this)
- Set the newly restored SSD as a boot drive (can this be done in True Image 2011?)
- Remove the 1TB HDD and install the 512GB SSD in its place (same SATA connection)

Do I have it right?

Note... my computer's MOBO supports SATA-II while this new drive is SATA-III. I know it will work with the transfer speeds limited to SATA-II. The OCX Vertex4 SSD supports TRIM which is also supported by Win7 Pro.