Cloning small SSD to larger SSD software recommendations?

[YeOldeStonecat]

Surprised in 2023 so many techs still use software to clone drives. We use an old Startech disk duplicator for SATA 2.5 and 3.5 form factor drives moving to same form factor and can retry bad sectors and jump over them if it can't get a good copy. We have two different M.2 duplicators, one for NVME to NVME drives and one for SSD to NVME (or vice versa) drives. After the bit-to-bit machine clone we resize the data partition. We only mess with software cloning these days when we have a customer who wants to move to a smaller drive. We do have a rapidspar for drives with more serious issues but for the most part, it doesn't get used.

This is what we use...the "drive goblins"...as they're often called...those Startech drive dupes. And we have some other brand ones for the M.2 drives. Just so much faster and easier....plug drives in, power up, push a button a couple of times, walk away...it'll copy across faster than anything else. Then we just expand the %system% volume in disk management once new drive is back in computer and booted up into Windows. Windows will expand it into unused space within the blink of an eye.

As for "software"...just about all drive brands offer software you can download for free....(usually a tweaked version of Acronis). We have a tower computer on our service bench with the side panel off, called "Franky"...some Dell Precision workstation or something like that..mobo has a tone of various ports on it. We just connect both drives, boot up into Acronis...and do the clone. It can resize on the fly..we use this approach as a last ditch effort if the source drive has a foot off the edge of the cliff and is pretty wonky, as Acronis can be told to ignore errors.

Have tried pretty much every cloning software under the sun, we've found Acronis just works fine and is pretty quick.