[ale] SSD to HDD cloning

[jon.maddog.hall@gmail.com]

Please take these comments in the tone that I am writing them...calm, friendly....not screaming...:-)

I would gently observe that there were A LOT of assumptions...

Usually "cloning" is best done from one disk to another of the same size, layout, make, etc.   Therefore bit for bit across the drive it is (more or less) the same.   I say "more or less" because there may be bad blocks on the substrate of the HDD media that forces a revectoring of a block every once in a while that can not be avoided.

In the subject line alone you have an SSD (which by definition has no seek time, rotational delay, etc. etc. to a hard disk which has all of that and more.  Some new drives are hybrid, so have both solid state and moving disk technology in them, using the solid state part like a very large cache.

If your "clone" is just to be used for backup, then optimal placement of data on the HDD is not as crucial, but if you are going to use it heavily and every day then taking more care to place the data on the disk is better, including re-thinking your filesystem type, block size, type of data being stored, etc.

Just adding a bit more data to the cloning equation.

md

> On 05/15/2022 3:43 PM DJPfulio--- via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
> 
>  
> On 5/15/22 09:51, Boris Borisov via Ale wrote:
> > What is the best way to do it.
> > 
> > Is Clonezilla sufficient?
> > 
> 
> You can use any tool that does a bit-for-bit copy.  I use cp. If I need to reduce the size of a partition, I'd use fsarchiver and work at the partition level, not whole disk.
> 
> Lots of assumptions involved, like ensuring the block sizes for both disks are the same.
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