I have an SSD drive that is too small. It's around 119 GB after formating. If I buy a larger drive, is there a program that will allow me to image a smaller drive onto a large drive with little time and effort? I don't want to have to reinstall programs. If I have to do that, I might as well start from scratch with a newer OS. I built this computer in 2009 with Win XP. There are programs on it I can't replicate installing easily.
Acronis True Image, for one. You can just clone the smaller drive onto the larger one. With Acronis, the size of the 2 drives doesn't matter so long as the drive being cloned "to" is large enough to hold the data coming from the other drive. (I clone from 250GB drives to old 80GB drives regularly in backup routine.) Might also check out Macrium Reflect. They have a free version, though perhaps a bit slow.. paid versions are faster, which should do the same.
I use AOMEI, it is a backup program with disk cloning features, and it's free. http://www.backup-utility.com/ Schaefer
Interesting that the most durable in this test failed at about 10,000 write cycles. (In an earlier similar test, an Intel X25-V had run 40,000+ write cycles and was still going strong after 3-years, when the test was terminated.) Apparently the makers determined they didn't really need to make SSDs as good/durable as the X25-V, and could get by with lesser (cheaper) quality. Fortunately, few end users will ever write >100TB to a drive (that's <500 write cycles on a 250GB drive) before making other plans. IOW... nearly all of us will be upgrading/replacing our current SSDs lonnnnng before they're worn out.
About 1 year into a cheaper Kingston 240gb SSD, showing .... 100% lifetime left. 4571GB Writes, 12377GB Reads that's going some Retired Blocks 0 4.5TB's written, fine till 200TB's so that's 40years approx, I'd of upgraded by then
Acronis vs Macrium for imaging Raid Disks. Anyone has direct experience? I'm faithfully backing up weekly, and spreadsheets get copied over to a thumb drive daily, but a crash will still mean a heck of a lot of searching and installing.