Intel offers free Acronis clone utility to SSD customers

[Matthew DeCarlo]

Besides their hefty price premium, solid-state drives come with obvious baggage: you have to clone your old data or install a fresh copy of your operating system. No matter the case, it's a hassle that inevitably deters some folks from taking the plunge, but Intel's hoping to ease that transition. The company has started offering its Data Migration Software to both new and existing SSD customers.

The clone utility is provided as a free download on Intel's site. Powered by Acronis, the software supposedly makes quick work of copying your data -- OS and system settings included. "Having a simple and accessible method to clone a user's exiting drive makes it that much easier for consumers to start experiencing the high performance of solid-state drive computing," said an Intel representative.

Along with getting the free Data Migration Software, Intel customers also have the option to upgrade to Acronis True Image Home 2011 for $30 instead of the full retail price of $50. There are plenty of freeware applications that offer the same, and probably more features than Intel's, but they may not be as easy to use. Feel free to share your preferred cloning utilities in the comments.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/40577-intel-offers-free-acronis-clone-utility-to-ssd-customers.html

 

[tonylukac]

I used Acronis in 2007. It is slow and took 5 hours to copy 80G, or was it 40G?

 

[Guest]

Acronis took me 8 minutes to clone a wd 320-5400rpm to a seagate 250-7200rpm in my hp laptop...also with seagate drives its free.

 

[Wendig0]

tonylukac said:
I used Acronis in 2007. It is slow and took 5 hours to copy 80G, or was it 40G?

Tony, I've never experienced Acronis being slow. Perhaps it was the system you were using, or maybe the drive itself was a slower drive? Whatever the case, it isn't typical of the program. I suspect there were underlying computer issues causing it to take so long.

I've used Acronis for years. I started using it professionally for server rollovers and migration on an enterprise level back in 2006, and I have never looked back. I have been using it at home ever since then as well. I have tried several other similar programs, but I prefer Acronis.

 

[Per Hansson]

I prefer to re-align the partition table so it falls on a 32k or 64k boundary, and isn't offset one cylinder which is otherwise the default (starting positions for new filesystems in XP is 63 cylinders)

The Windows 2000 resource kit has a tool named "diskpar.exe" (not the same as Diskpart.exe) which can manually do this, then I transfer the filesystem image using the trial version of Drive Snapshot to the raw partition created using diskpar.exe

 

[Burty117]

If you buy a Western Digital Drive aswell and go to there suppport page you can download an Acronis WD version of the software which will basically take an image of all your data and you can back it up on a separate partition and use it as a recovery partition incase your machine ever breaks down.

 

[Leeky]

The free Acronis based utilities for Seagate, Maxtor and Western Digital drives are available via the link from this Techspot thread.

I personally use the Seagate version and highly recommend it.

 

[Guest]

When you migrate your entire system partition, is Win 7 smart enough to disable all the things that tire SSD's, like defrag, superfetch and indexing ? I know it does it automatically on a clean install, but no idea how it behaves on a cloned partition.

I use a very fast and free partition cloning and backup software called Macrium Reflect Free. It supports Win 7 x64 natively (compiled for 64 bit). It uses a Linux bootable drive that I've cloned and installed on a pen drive with Unetbootin. It's much more convenient this way, since CD's are easily lost or misplaced.

 

[EXCellR8]

SSD's do not require defragging, and the superfetch (which is mild compared to vista) and indexing properties will be cloned. There is software that you can download that will optimize reads and writes on the SSD, but I don't believe it to be absolutely necessary.

I use True Image 2010 all the time. It lacks a few options that I would really like to have, but it's relatively quick and very easy to use. The compression is a bit strange at times, but I suppose it just has to do with what you are backing up or cloning. I haven't had any problems with it under Windows 7 64-bit so I will probably keep it around and continue using it for some time.

 

[DelJo63]

I prefer to re-align the partition table so it falls on a 32k or 64k boundary, and isn't offset one cylinder which is otherwise the default (starting positions for new filesystems in XP is 63 cylinders)

Interesting concept - - did this frequently for Unix+Linux.

What's the benefit in Windows? TIA

 

[Per Hansson]

Guest: MS has said that Win7 disables defrag and other things depending on the performance score, so an educated guess would be if you rerun the Windows performance test it should automagically disable it, have not tried it tho...

jobeard said:
What's the benefit in Windows? TIA

For SSD's it greatly improves performance, depends on the model of the SSD too
See this Anandtech article, shows the difference I speak of...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3681/oczs-vertex-2-special-sauce-sf1200-reviewed/6

It relates to big RAID arrays on normal HDD's aswell, as this Microsoft article explains;
http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Disk-Geometry.html

 

[Fiona99]

I think no matter what software you use, keep your information secure and have no influence on your computer speed. Wondershare WinSuite 2012 is such a tool that has many new features especially fast cleaning up of your system.