Migration Software......Any good???

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magoo

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So I bought a couple of SSds (one Intel and one Samsung) to use as OS drives in my computers.
They are 240 GB capacity drives.
I'll have plenty of space to migrate my OS and everything else on the current C drive.

Is the Intel and/or Samsung data migration software any good? Or should I just hand load the OS, etc myself?

I have no experience with this stuff.:D
 
I have never used either however if these do not work there are dozens of free utilities that can do this for you.
 
drescherjm said:
I have never used either however if these do not work there are dozens of free utilities that can do this for you.
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Any specific suggestion? I'm looking to port over everything to a larger SSD as well.
 
tinate said:
Any specific suggestion? I'm looking to port over everything to a larger SSD as well.
Click to expand...

I was able to use EaseUS Todo Backup to migrate a UEFI RAID 0 volume without any issues. Excellent and completely free, most free migration tools won't even touch UEFI-based installs.
 
When I used the Intel-bundled software (back when my Intel 320 SSD was new) it was a limited version of Acronis and it worked fine. For other options:

Today I mostly use Clonezilla, but you have to be very careful with Clonezilla. Many versions are VERY buggy, and I do mean the "stable" versions. Sometimes various compression options such as LZMA simply fail to restore (and you get no indication of this during backup unless you use the option to verify that it's restorable which takes a lot of time). Sometimes various cloning methods such as Partclone will fail on certain filesystems - have had versions where I HAD to use NTFSClone for NTFS because Partclone was buggy. I've even had versions which fail outright for things like bad parameters. And these problems were all in the "STABLE" branches which were clearly untested. Absolutely ridiculous! As much as I love Linux, the developers that work around it seem to be content in releasing alpha and beta quality software as RC and finals. (Even the Linux kernel itself is doing "RC" which should really be alpha or beta and the releases themselves should be RC or even betas! They break major features constantly!)

So in short I do recommend Clonezilla, but you yourself have to test each version before relying on it. Assume that ANY release from them is beta quality at best, no matter what. And do NOT update versions until there is a reason to since they will likely break something that was working fine previously. Also, find one set of parameters (e.g. cloning and compression methods) to use and stick with them.

If you're working with partitions that it supports, the best is probably Macrium Reflect, but that'll cost you money. It works with fewer filesystems than some other options such as Clonezilla, too.
 
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Samsung's seems to work VERY well. I've done probably 50 or so clones with the Sammy software in the last few months, with only 1 failure. A re-clone did the trick for the single failure. I haven't used the Intel tool, so I can't comment on it.
 
Can use the built-in Windows Backup & Restore.

Can use a Linux Live DVD and use "dd" to do an exact bit copy. Boot up the new hard drive into Windows and go to Administrative Tools > Computer Management > and expand the partition to fill the unused space. This is the method I use.
 
Thanks for the advice.:cool:

I picked up several SSDs during recent sales, so I'm going to see what will work the best.
For the Samsung and Intel I'm going to use the proprietary software, but I got a Kingston Fury as well and I don't think they offer any software....so I guess I'll try the Windows approach for that one.
 
I used the Intel migration software to clone my system drive to the new 730 I got from the Newegg sale last week. And yes it looks like Intel just slapped their logo on a simple Acronis toolkit. However, my friend also bought a pair of the same drives for raid and the toolkit refuses to run because it cant properly detect the Intel-brand drives behind the raid. So that might be something to consider.

For me, everything worked on the first go and the new partition was properly aligned so no complaints here.
 
How well does Windows' system imaging work for SSD backup and/or migration?

I use it for SSD backup of my Window 7 Pro desktop,where it backs itself up nightly to a network share. But I don't really know how best to test how well it can restore a system. I envision a scenario where I may lose the SSD completely, but have to replace it with another model and size of SSD. Can this be done with Windows' system imaging?
 
I actually had to restore an image from Clonezilla. Not a week before my sister-in-law's computer with 60GB of irreplaceable family pictures went belly up, I did a Clonezilla backup of that hard drive - the only backup that computer had ever had. She speaks to me much more politely now than she used to.

These were the Linux commands I needed to learn to decompress and mount that image. There was probably better and easier ways but that's the way that got it done. That dash without a letter in the middle is not a typo and is important somehow; following it is a capital "oh", not a zero. I post it in case it helps someone else later, though I don't know if it will work with current versions of Clonezilla or the particular way in which you use it.

touch sda1.img

sudo cat sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.* | sudo gzip -d -c | sudo partclone.restore -C -s - -O /tmp/sda1.img

ntfs-3g -o loop sda1.img /mnt
 
evilsofa said:
I actually had to restore an image from Clonezilla. Not a week before my sister-in-law's computer with 60GB of irreplaceable family pictures went belly up, I did a Clonezilla backup of that hard drive - the only backup that computer had ever had. She speaks to me much more politely now than she used to.

These were the Linux commands I needed to learn to decompress and mount that image. There was probably better and easier ways but that's the way that got it done. That dash without a letter in the middle is not a typo and is important somehow; following it is a capital "oh", not a zero. I post it in case it helps someone else later, though I don't know if it will work with current versions of Clonezilla or the particular way in which you use it.

touch sda1.img

sudo cat sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.* | sudo gzip -d -c | sudo partclone.restore -C -s - -O /tmp/sda1.img

ntfs-3g -o loop sda1.img /mnt
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That dash without a typo most likely means "read from stdin" (aka: the data you are throwing at it via pipe) :)
 
I just use Acronis 2013, though I should probably look to get the newer version. I have it on a boot flash drive and have used it for 2 years now cloning drives without any issues.
 
AthlonXP said:
I just use Acronis 2013, though I should probably look to get the newer version. I have it on a boot flash drive and have used it for 2 years now cloning drives without any issues.
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Keep the same version until there is a compelling reason to update, such as better compression (if it would be of benefit to you), better error correction, additional filesystem support, etc.
 
I used Samsung's own Data Migration software a few days ago when I got my new 840 EVO drive. It cloned the Win 8.1 partition on my Kingston 120GB to the new EVO with no problems.
 
I used EasyUS Partition Master to port my HDD's system to my SSD (the sizes did not match), worked flawlessly.
 
All these software cloning programs are essentially the same thing, they just copy the 1's and 0's over to the new drive. The big differences is what they offer, if you are only using it to copy your drive to the new drive and never use it again just use either the Intel's or Samsung's offering.

I have used both, both work.
 
Trimlock said:
All these software cloning programs are essentially the same thing, they just copy the 1's and 0's over to the new drive. The big differences is what they offer, if you are only using it to copy your drive to the new drive and never use it again just use either the Intel's or Samsung's offering.

I have used both, both work.
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Is that really all they do? What if you're moving from an HDD to SSD or from one size and model SSD to a different one? Wouldn't Windows need different drivers in either case, or is it just assumed that the system will boot anyway and that the user will take care of any fine-tuning of drivers and OS settings afterward?
 
Cloned my 250GB Evo 840 to my new 500GB Evo 840 using Samsung's included software. Worked perfectly.
 
JJ Johnson said:
Is that really all they do? What if you're moving from an HDD to SSD or from one size and model SSD to a different one? Wouldn't Windows need different drivers in either case, or is it just assumed that the system will boot anyway and that the user will take care of any fine-tuning of drivers and OS settings afterward?
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I'm not sure what you are asking.

The drivers are installed on bootup, the data is still there, it doesn't matter if you go from HDD to SDD or from EVO to Pro or from 256gb to 512gb.
 
Moved from Samsung 830 to Evo with their cloning soft. Absolutely no problems at all with cloning and booting. The only problem I had was that I needed to reactivate my 8.1, because it's a protection from cloning activated, original version of OS to another computer.
 
I imagine the samsung cloning software will be fine.

Recently migrated between SSD's using clonezilla, just the disk to disk option.

If you are going to migrate from a single bigger hdd (say, 300GB of data) to two ssd's you may want to check for pitfalls, maybe even move some media files first to one disk and clone the remainder to the other one.
 
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