HD to SSD question.

[Heinz Diehl]

On 19.08.2013, Erik P. Olsen wrote: 

> I plan to swap the HD on my laptop with an SSD of same size. Will it work OK
> if I dd the HD to an external HD, swap the HD with the SSD and dd the
> contents back to the SSD?

Technically it would work, but you'll most probably encounter a huge
performance drop. Partitions on SSD drives need to be properly
aligned to the block boundaries (4k), because they use a 
blocksize of 4k (at least the ones I own), similar to the WD "advanced format". 
Most of the rotational drives (except those who use "advanced format"
or similar) use a 512 byte blocksize. DDing such a disk to a solid
state device could be a bad idea.

The best way to do it in my opinion is to backup all partitions using
rsync (*), partitioning and formatting the SSD with proper alignment,
using rsync to transfer the data back, and simply re-install GRUB2. I
have done that quite often, without any problems.

(*) rsync -avxHSAX /source/ /target

Don't forget to switch to the deadline elevator, it works a lot
better than cfq in combination with non-rotational drives.