Need to image my current ssd and put it on a new ssd...how?

I have a usb thumb drive 3.2 usb and also my system drive which is an ssd. Can I use the usb thumb drive to drop an image of my current ssd and then put the new ssd in and image the new ssd with the saved image on the usb thumb drive?

Would this work? What free tools or apps can I use to do this. Hehe in my day they were called programs...but I guess apps now. Would I need to worry about partition alignment or anything weird like that when copying the image to the new drive? I was looking at the app disk genius...any good?

Thank you!

Research Acronis true image.

What SSD is it? Its manufacturer may have such a software for free on his homepage, like samsung does.

You can download the final version of macrium reflect free, I think majorgeeks hosts it, and use the make rescue media tool to make a bootable usb which can image and restore disk images. You'd put that rescue media on a blank usb drive, boot up into the rescue environment, image your disk to a USB drive (must be fairly large even with compression), shut down, swap out ssd for new one, boot back into rescue environment and restore the image to the new ssd.

Or if you have multiple ssd slots, can just skip the image and restore and go right to clone old ssd to new ssd in the rescue media.

Yeah Macrium Reflect's bootable recovery thumb drive is good for this. I recently restored an image of one SSD to another (higher capacity) SSD, which was also Bitlocker encrypted and went without any issues.

Okatis said:

Yeah Macrium Reflect's bootable recovery thumb drive is good for this. I recently restored an image of one SSD to another (higher capacity) SSD, which was also Bitlocker encrypted and went without any issues.

Click to expand...

And it makes expanding the primary partition easy even if it's a middle partition, something windows disk management always seemed to have a problem with.

use the oems tool.

Download "v8.0.7783_reflect_setup_free_x64.exe" of Macrium Reflect from the Internet Archive. That's the last free version and works just fine with Windows 11 to backup and restore to nVme.