About to Upgrade Hard drive

[khary23]

I'm about to upgrade my hard drive and wanted to know get some opinions about cloning vs using the rescue and recovery DVDs. Thanks

[ZaZ]

I prefer True Image. I find R&R to be sort of bloated. I do a clean install, then make an image. I can put it back at any time, then just do any needed updates.

[khary23]

I apologise for my ignorance, but I do not know what a true image is.

I am also running a vurtial box with a ton of stuff that I cannot loose will cloning preserve that data?

[ZaZ]

I don't know much about vurtial box, but True Image is a disc cloner that clones the disc, which you can put on the new drive. You can always hang onto the old drive until you're sure it works. Buying a Seagate or WD hard drive gets you a free download of True Image via their web sites.

[Johan]

I'm about to upgrade my hard drive and wanted to know get some opinions about cloning vs using the rescue and recovery DVDs. Thanks

I'd suggest that you consider upgrading your present (assumed: Mechanical?) HDD to a SSD... and perhaps also consider upgrading to Windows 7, if you haven't already done this. Benefit of SSD + Win7 is superb speed (try e.g. see the Newegg.com and/or Amazon.com sites user feedback for the Intel X25-M SSD!). While SSD's are significantly more expensive per GB compared to mechanical HDD's, SSD's are completely silent, consume less power (longer battery time!), and are FAST! A recent/present thread - SSD Upgrade for T60p How-to? Need suggestions - discuss SSD upgrade of a T60... maybe of interest for you too?

For opinions about what brand SSD or HDD to get, consider your needs (max. cost, min. required capacity?) and then again see the user/buyer feedback on e.g. Newegg or Amazon and use the forum.thinkpads.com search script by forum moderator HarryC to dig into the vast archieves of this forum for Thinkpad-users opinions. The largest capacity HDD presently available for T60's is 750 GB; see the list of Newegg selection. You will want a 2.5" HDD (9.5 mm high) with a SATA interface. As T60's will only run SATA-I speeds (1.5 Gb/s) there is no benefit in getting e.g. the very fastest SSD... your T60 can't take advantage of it.

As to what cloning tool to use, most HDD and SSD manufacturers actually have free, limited versions of the popular Acronis True Image cloning software ("limited" in the sense that the particular manufacturers version only works with their own HDD or SSD); see e.g. the threads T60p hard drive replacement and Acronis True Image WD Edition Software, or simply get the full-functional, time-limited version of Acronis True Image from the company's own homepage; see and Rescue and Recovery. Intel has the free "Data Migration Tool"; see this post.

Johan

[khary23]

Thanks for all of the information!
I would love to get an SSD, but really can't afford it at the moment. When I do the cloning I assume I will also have to buy an enclosure correct?

[ZaZ]

You could do it on a SD card if you had a big enough one, but you'll need some sort of external storage to store the image file.