ThinkPad W500 S.A.T.A. Ultrabay Slim: Cloning Hard-Disk Drive and S.S.D.

[Commando303]

Hello, I wish to clone my hard-disk drives and S.S.D.s on my ThinkPad W500, and I wonder whether anyone might have experience accomplishing this using the S.A.T.A. Ultrabay Slim caddy for storage media. The procedure altogether takes quite some while, and if it is known that the Ultrabay will pose problems, I shall use a U.S.B. enclosure instead (my thought of the Ultrabay stems from the hope that it might abet faster execution). Also, if using the Ultrabay (or the U.S.B. enclosure), would it matter which drive (the original/full versus the new/empty) should go in the drive-slot of the laptop, and which in the Ultrabay or U.S.B. enclosure?

Note, one of the drives to be cloned is running Windows 10 Professional, 64-bit; the other, Windows 7 Professional, 64-bit. The cloning software applications I am considering are Acronis True Image, and DiscWizard.

Thank you very much for your help.

[axur-delmeria]

I don't have a Thinkpad with SATA Ultrabay, but have some experience with cloning drives over SATA and USB enclosures.

1. Since the W500 only has USB 2.0 ports, it's better to use direct SATA connections.
If you have to use a USB enclosure, put the new drive in the laptop itself-- I've read some posts elsewhere in this forum where an HDD in the laptop was cloned to an SSD in an enclosure, but the cloned SSD won't boot after it's installed in the laptop.

2. You don't even need to perform the cloning operation on the laptop itself-- if you have a desktop PC with extra SATA ports, you can use that.

3. I generally boot from USB media that contains cloning software:

- a small external SSD with Debian Linux and Clonezilla,
- a flash disk with Hirens BootCD PE which includes Macrium Reflect Free 7.

Macrium Reflect is useful in cases where the old drive has larger capacity than the new drive, but the used space can fit (e.g. clone a 500GB HDD with only 200GB used space to a 250GB SSD).