Copying one SSD to another

[psufan14]

I built my computer earlier in the year, and I have a general questions on how to accomplish something. I have a 64GB SSD boot drive with my OS, drivers, and some frequently used programs. I currently have about 50G used, and thats a bit low in terms of unused space for me. If I bought a 128GB SSD hard drive, how easy is it to just copy the entire 64GB drive to this one so i can just use the 128GB disk as my boot drive?

Is it as simple as installing the 128GB drive as another hard drive, formatting it, then using clonezilla or norton ghost to copy the entire drive over, then swapping it with the 64GB one?

I am trying to avoid having to re-download all my drivers, reinstall the OS, and all the other programs I have on there just to get more unused space...

 

[John_VanKirk]

Hi there,

You are right on the ball!

What you want to do is to "clone" the smaller SSD to the larger one. That moves everything, sector by sector to the new drive. Doesn't make any difference if it's an OS file, a driver, a program or a data file.

Some of the SSD's come with a cloning applet, for example the Samsung 830's uses Ghost.
If you have a separage computer, you can connect both the old and new SSD to it, by SATA or USB, and using an installed application program (free or commercial), (clonzilla, easeus partition master) (acronis true image, ghost) clone the smaller to larger. If no separate computer, you can use an ISO CD linux based program like parted magic, clonzilla, acronis, etc. to accomplish the same thing.

Then you just swap the smaller SSD with the larger one, and you are good to go. Afterward, in Disk Management, or another program like EaseUS Partition Master, you can adjust the partition size if needed.

Only other aside comment, is to consider a 256GB SSD, which gives you plenty of space even for programs and data. It won't be long before you go from 50GB to 80 GB, and then you will begin looking for another size up. They actually are faster than the 128GB size by specs. Prices have dropped significantly and you can find them at <$1/GB.