dd blocksize when copying to SSD disk

[Valeri Galtsev]

On Wed, August 31, 2016 2:40 pm, Mike Clarke wrote:
> On Wednesday 31 Aug 2016 14:49:25 Kevin P. Neal wrote:
>> On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 06:35:28PM +0200, Christoph P.U. Kukulies wrote:
>> > I'm about to copy an existing Windows 7 system to an SSD. Source drive
>> > is a hard disk of 256 GB, destination drive a 500 GB Samsung SSD 850
>> EVO.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > Given the fact that unnecessary write operations to SSDs should be
>> > avoided I'm thinking about the best strategy to use dd to write to the
>> > SSD.
>>
>> I'm not sure that dd is the best strategy. Using Windows to do the copy
>> may be better.
>
> But the Windows copy command isn't very good at copying the entire system,
> it
> will fail to copy open files and certain "special" system files. On the
> other
> hand dd will copy everything in the partition but at the expense of
> wasting
> space by copying all the unused blocks.

Apparently Kevin was suggesting "windows way" of doing this, which is
making "image backup", I described that in reply to his post.

Valeri

>
> An alternative would be to use Driveimage XML
> <www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm> from within Windows to create a
> compressed backup of all used blocks in the system. It's also available on
> a
> Knopixx live CD <www.runtime.org/data-recovery-live-cd> which, I think,
> runs
> it under wine so it could probably be run under wine on FreeBSD to create
> or
> restore a backup of an entire Windows partition.
>
> --
> Mike Clarke
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++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
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