Cloning HDD > SSHD - Question re: Recovery Partitions

Taking your last query first re whether I have any particular recommendations involving SSDHs, my answer is a resounding "no". For one thing I've had precious little experience with those devices and as a general proposition I'm not thrilled with their performance. The users I've spoken to about their experience with their SSHDs more-or-less parallels mine. Seems for a variety of purposes it's a concept that offers more than it delivers. But that's one man's opinion of course and since you may be investing in that technology it would be well for you to research the issue a good deal further.

Glad to hear you're more than satisfied with that Startech docking/cloning station. I'll look into it further but I really don't think it's a route we'll take. We've been using the Casper disk-cloning program for about a dozen years now and I've never found a program its equal. While we obviously have some interest in a "one-shot" disk-to-disk cloning operation involving the typical scenario of cloning the contents of a user's HDD to his/her shiny new SSD, our primary interest is using the program for comprehensive system backup operations. We clone our drives quite frequently - many times even daily and rarely less than a few times per week. In that way we maintain up-to-date comprehensive backups of our systems and are quite comfortable with the peace-of-mind that process yields. The particular value of the Casper program (aside from its general effectiveness, ease-of-use, partition manipulation, and a few other goodies) is in its speed of operations when the program is used routinely/frequently.

Our desktop PCs are all equipped with mobile racks (removable drives for both HDD & SSD), so we have great flexibility with the disk-cloning operations. And, of course, we utilize USB external HDD/SSD enclosures as well when the situation calls for it.

You might want to take a look at the Casper program. There's a 15-day trial version available. It's slightly crippled re partition manipulation but it can give you a fairly good idea of the commercial version which sells for $49.99. See http://www.fssdev.com
No reason why you couldn't use the program with your Startech device. Keep in mind, however, that it's chief value is when the program will be used - and used fairly frequently - for comprehensive backup purposes of one's system.

Yes, you've given me a clear picture of your primary, if not exclusive, interest re the issue we've been discussing. I suppose it's another case of "different strokes for different folks".

Obviously a disk-cloning program is not designed to speed up OS operations in any appreciable way. It's exclusive objective is to create a precise copy of the source disk taking into consideration any differences in disk-size between the source & destination disks. It's ultimate value, of course, is that by achieving this objective the user has at hand a bootable, completely functional drive with all data immediately accessible to the user, so that in the event of his/her day-to-day working HDD/SSD becoming mechanically/electronically defective and thus completely unusable or if that drive becomes so system corrupt that it's similarly unusable, the user can easily & quickly resurrect his/her system to a functional state.

BTW, in the meantime I got in touch with Casper's tech support re the cloning of a HDD to a SSDH and their response paralleled my earlier one in that Casper should have no issues performing such a backup. I would guess that capability would similarly extend to any disk-cloning program. Of course, in the final analysis your experience is the crucial one.