dd blocksize when copying to SSD disk

[Brandon J. Wandersee]

Mike Clarke writes:

> 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.
>
> 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.

For what it's worth, I've used EaseUs Todo Backup to completely clone a
Windows install from one disk to another. It's not a spectacular
program, but it's free to use and did the trick.

-- 
::  Brandon J. Wandersee
::  brandon.wandersee at gmail.com
::  --------------------------------------------------
::  'The best design is as little design as possible.'
::  --- Dieter Rams ----------------------------------