SSD to SSD clone OK?

I've heard that it's a bad idea to clone a standard mechanical HDD to a SSD. My interpretation was that doing so creates performance issues with the SSD. With that in mind, my questions are three-fold:
1. Is that true?
2. Is it equally true of cloning one SSD to another, or is that fine?
3. Is it okay to clone a smaller SSD to a larger one, and resize the partition?

 

I recently cloned my old spinner to a new SSD with zero problems - providing the SSD partition is correctly aligned, there will be no performance hit; running the WEI will force Windows to recognize the SSD and disable defrag and other features that aren't needed for SSD's.

 

Just FUD by the ill-informed, that think that platter drives will be around forever. These are also the same ones that thought that floppy was going to be around longer, than they actually were. Within the next two years, SSD will start to become the norm on the majority of portable devices, with this year starting the kick off.

I already replaced the 5400rpm platter drive in my Netbook with a SSD, and have seen a performance boost. If you are looking at replacing a platter in a desktop with a SSD, you may want to look at a SSD Cache drive vs. a SSD, depending on how you use the computer. I can tell you this, since I have replaced my old school hard drive with a SSD, my battery life on my netbook went from 6hrs to 18hrs battery life. Also runs about 20-30 degrees cooler. I have not seen it get any higher than 115f, even doing CPU intense operations.

 

I would not call it FUD by the ill-informed. The facts are, if you "clone" an HD to an SSD, the sector alignment is often off. This is correctly addressed in that How-to link, SSD installation instructions and all over the net. This is necessary information anyone migrating to SSDs needs to be aware of.

Therefore, "FUD"? No.
Necessary warning? Yes.
"Unintentional" poorly worded warnings? Yeah, probably.

Ummm, since the floppy is still around (though today, it is typically a USB external device), maybe they were right. A floppy is still frequently used to boot to when testing RAM, or when flashing the BIOS. Creating a floppy for those tasks is still MUCH easier than burning an optical disk.

For troubleshooting purposes, I always keep a floppy drive nearby. I will give that up when they pry my full sized keyboard from my dead hands in their attempt to push me towards touchscreen devices.

I agree, though I would say this trend kicked off last year, if not the year before. This was in part due to the massive flooding in SE Asia destroying or damaging much of the harddrive manufacturing capability, plus the declining price per Gb of SSD storage.

I also agree the new hybrid drives with their use of large (for HDs) SSD buffers are proving to be very good compromises to the more expensive SSDs. They improve performance without costing an arm and a leg. Good suggestion there!

Ummm, no. Sorry, but that is not quite right. WEI just measures or counts and updates its score. It does not force the OS to recognize, or to reconfigure itself for the new hardware.

The drive is recognized in the BIOS (WAY before the OS is loaded). And it is configured for the OS as soon as Windows loads the drivers.

You NEVER "need" to run WEI to force Windows to do anything - except update the WEI scores.

 

I was trying to describe what seemed to happen in my instance; post-clone, I checked the status of the partition alignment, Defrag, ReadyBoost and Superfetch. Alignment was correct, the others were as before - enabled. I ran WEI then rechecked them to find they'd been disabled. I can think of no other reason that the status of those 3 Services altered in the few minutes between checks.

WEI did update the scores, too.

 

Where did you check them? If you had checked the status through the drive's Properties, they should have been correct - but this would not be reflected in WEI until WEI is run again.

And what I think happened is WEI just reported the new status after it had been re-run.

WEI does not run, or update itself automatically. You have to "Re-run the assessment", as the button says. If you look now on your WEI page, it will show in the lower left of the main panel the last time you ran WEI. Mine was months ago.

Now if you are saying you looked under Computer, right-clicked on the drive, selected Properties, and from there saw that Windows did not properly disable those features, then I am at a lost. Because Windows should have done that at boot, not when you run WEI. WEI just reports, it does not configure.

 

Checked via MSInfo32, Task Scheduler and TaskMan's Services tab.

WinSAT, part of the WEI, does run by default on a weekly schedule.

 

Now wait! Just because a program like defrag is scheduled to run, or is running, that does not mean it will run on every drive in your machine. Taskman, MSInfo32, and Task Schedule may show those programs are running, but they don't show which drives are affected. You have to open each individual applet and see how it is configured for that - unless I am missing something here.

Yes, WinSAT is used by WEI, but as its name implies, it is an "assessment" tool. It is not a Windows "configuration" tool.

And note by default it runs at 1am on Sundays. Just checking my logs on several machines here, my computers were asleep during that time. And programs don't run when your computer is asleep. So scheduled to run is not the same thing as running. And note missed tasks don't automatically run when the computer wakes.

Note this Microsoft article on WEI for Windows 7 where it says,

What I think is happening here is you witnessed a "reporting" issues (bug?) between what WEI last saw, and what Windows sees now. And it is only after you Re-ran the assessment that WEI was correctly updated.

Because bottom line, WEI does not enable or disable any tasks! Not on drives or anything else. It just reports benchmarks. And the reality is, it does not do that very well either. I don't pay much attention to WEI scores. I certainly recommend no one lose any sleep over them. Those scores are more for Microsoft than us users.

 

So your explanation is that nothing changed, it was all set at first boot by some unknown subsystem related to HAL and WinSAT/WEI did nothing to the running Services but something else triggered the changes during or immediately after running it.

Does that mean that TaskMan and MSInfo32 rely on WEI/WinSAT for their data?

 

I said nothing about HAL. I am not that intimately familiar with the inner workings of the Windows kernel to say what is associated with what. I am just saying that WEI does NOT change settings, as was suggested above.

Right? Is "Found new hardware" controlled by WEI? No.

Think about it for a minute. Do you have to run WEI when you add RAM so Windows can use that new RAM? Do you need to run WEI for Windows to see or use a new hard drive? What if you plug in a flash drive? Do you have to run WEI to enable RAMBoost? If you upgrade your graphics card, do you have to run WEI to take advantage of its features or improved performance?

"No!" In all cases.

Again, WEI is an assessment tool, not a configuration tool.

Absolutely not! And I have said nothing that implied that. Once again, it is an assessment tool - a benchmarking tool. It is not related to TaskMan or MSInfo32. It may get some of its information from the same places as those "monitoring" tool. But they are not the same as this "assessment" tool.

You just saw something that, because of timing alone, made it "appear" as though WEI changed something, when it fact, it was just reporting the change.

 

So what did change the settings?

 

:confused Not sure what you are after here. When you install new hardware, or swap out hardware, this is detected at a basic hw level by the BIOS and/or by the OS. Both the BIOS (which is a mini-OS running on the motherboard) and the OS will attempt to communicate with the new HW at a basic level (as per established industry standards). For example, ALL graphics cards (or integrated) and ALL computer monitors and Windows (and other OSes) know natively how to communicate (handshake) at "basic" "standard VGA" resolutions. It would be pretty hard to install Windows if the screen stayed black until you installed your graphics drivers. And it would be pretty hard to download those drivers if the OS did not already know how to use a standard NIC.

If there is a hardware change that affects basic motherboard communications, the BIOS will likely halt and yell at you about checksum errors, or it will set the new information and press on to the first device set in the Boot order. From there, the OS will [hopefully] detect the new hardware (at a basic level) and will attempt to load the correct driver to communicate at advanced levels. If it cannot find a driver, it will yell at you to insert a disk or search the Internet. Once the driver is installed, the computer (BIOS/CMOS) and Windows are good to go.

And all that with absolutely no input from WEI.

Now, this thread is about 94dgrif's SSD questions and it needs to get back on topic. Sorry about running it OT, 94.

@satrow - If you still feel WEI changes configuration settings, please start a new thread with that topic in the right section. And please, use our friend Bing Google to include some links to supporting evidence. I showed where Microsoft says how it works. I can't force you to believe them, but I think you should - at least in this case.

 

Thank you everyone for the advice. I think I have had enough responses to be comfortable with the answer that cloning to a SSD card produces no performance drops. In summary for anyone else reading this thread looking for answers:
1. It is fine to clone a HDD to SSD
2. It is fine to clone a SSD to SSD
3. It is okay to resize a SSD partition

Since this thread has a lot of interest and it's relevant to the original post, I have a follow-up question.

Some time ago I read that you can configure XP to run from an SSD without it hurting the SSD too much (from prefetch, defrags and so on), though it takes some fiddling. Does anyone have any experience with this, and any advice to give?

 

With caveats! When cloning (as opposed to just copying to) you need to check alignments.

As for XP on SSD, I have not tried it (except via VM). But I don't see what difference it makes, as long as you can find the right XP drivers for it. Remember, XP never heard of SSD (or SATA). So that is why you must load special drivers during the OS install for SATA. I expect you must do the same with SSD. But again, I have not tried installing XP on an SSD because XP needs to go away. It is a 12 year old OS designed when security was an afterthought to support software and hardware from the DOS-age!

 

Digi: You dived in with the 'facts', I only added my experience of cloning a spinning drive to an SSD. I have no intention of wasting any more of my time on you or any search engine in this matter.

 

??? Don't know what brought that on, but "personal" attacks have no place in technical discussions. Looking back, keeping it technical, rather than personal, is all I have done. Nothing personal meant on my part, but I apologize just the same.

But since I was trying to answer a bunch of your questions - answers for which you refuse to accept, or offer any corroborating links to support your position, in spite of my link to the horse's mouth, I question who's time has been wasted.