Cloning laptop hard drive

[Neilwood]

Used Acronis for doing my last cloning - was really quite simple and quick to use.

[Paul Evans]

I have been buying SSDs from Crucial.com for years now, simply because they provide Acronis TrueImage along with it. I'm adept at using tools like Clonezilla but this is just so easy it's worth the extra quid or two. It will clone your existing HD, from your running OS, onto your new SSD (in a caddy or whatever) with an absolute minimum of hassle. I used it recently to upgrade an early ultrabook - the job was done in 20 minutes flat.

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[Mikael]

Thanks everyone for all the advice, two quick fire questions below:

However.... I am guessing you have integrated graphics on your chipset and it could be that which is breaking down when under load. You could test whether it is your hard drive by copying a video that gives you the issue to a USB stick and seeing if it runs glitch free without involving your hard drive.

It is video that I am streaming that glitches. I have tried to recreate the problem playing some of my own videos and although I am sure I had some problems previously as of this weekend I can't seem to recreate the issue (tried VLC player, windows media player and digital photo professional).

I have been buying SSDs from Crucial.com for years now, simply because they provide Acronis TrueImage along with it. I'm adept at using tools like Clonezilla but this is just so easy it's worth the extra quid or two. It will clone your existing HD, from your running OS, onto your new SSD (in a caddy or whatever) with an absolute minimum of hassle. I used it recently to upgrade an early ultrabook - the job was done in 20 minutes flat.

Crucial do as standard a caddied 500gb portable SSD. Ample as I have 256gb SSD on my laptop.
If I clone onto this drive would I be able to use the remaining space for some other storage or would I be better off solely using the SSD to keep a copy of my laptop drive?

[OrangeHead]

Crucial do as standard a caddied 500gb portable SSD. Ample as I have 256gb SSD on my laptop.
If I clone onto this drive would I be able to use the remaining space for some other storage or would I be better off solely using the SSD to keep a copy of my laptop drive?

Straightforward cloning would generally overwrite the whole target drive. With Acronis you can also do a backup of your system drive, to a file on the target drive. That would leave space for other uses, but it's best to keep things simple. You'd also want to create recovery media - if you lost the system drive you could then boot using the recovery media and restore to a new system drive from that backup file on your external SSD. By the way I've never tried this with Acronis but it should be pretty straightforward :-)