i wonder if this clones a HDD OS to an SSD properly, or if it's the same with samsung's data migration program.
the story of my own mishaps when trying to clone a drive:
i recently bought a samsung 850 evo SSD (just a meager 256 GB, but more than plenty enough for me), thinking of using it to upgrade my PC. i used samsung data migration program to do a clone copy. everything seemed to work fine at first. then problems start coming up one after another.
the original OS drive was in a RAID 1 array (dual WDRed 2 tb). couple of weeks before, i figured out after much googling and reading that i can break the array without affecting the usability of each drives. i had been experimenting with breaking and rebuilding raid 1 arrays, and also trying out the ReFS (resilient file system) partition on my junk data.
so... i thought the process was going to be a simple one, that i was just going to break the array, then take out one mirror copy drive (and put this in my cupboard for later reuse), plug in the samsung SSD, run the data migration wizard (latest version from samsung, not the un-updated version provided by their DVDs along with the SSD box), and when done, i can just power down the computer, take out the other original Raid-1ed HDD, power back up, and call it a day!
everything started to work just like before. in fact, system seemed much snappier. i was glad.
🙂then i know what happens when i'm glad. my fingers started to get itchy (my culture's metaphor for curiosity got the better of me). i started checking
What happens if... scenarios, things i did out of curiosity and the subsequent fubars i found out:
1. the sata bios settings was still under RAID mode in port 1-4, and port 5-6. i theorized if i could make it into AHCI mode because samsung magician software lists that the SSD isn't running optimally. read couple of guides on what registry keys to change to enable MSAHCI. tried just that and jotting it down in a separate laptop what i did, just in case i have to rollback.
result: no good. the system went into a forever boot loop. even windows' own boot repair couldn't help it to boot. this problem is easily fixed by setting the sata ports back to RAID, with a tiny caveat, once it's in RAID mode, all ports lose the AHCI functionality, and no Crystaldiskinfos, Hwinfo64s can read the Drives' health status. it's still fine because the AMDraidXpert can report each physical drives and raid arrays' health.
2. the deal killer is when i finished with the scenario one above, and my gut sense was telling me something: i cloned this from a HDD, i lost AHCI functionality. do i lose TRIM? hmm... by then i had already nuked Original HDD #1's partition into oblivion and finished moving data to their respective places.
my Gut told me to check the Drive Defragmenter on windows, and try to run a defragment. Drive C, Media type: HDD. <- danger!
my utter curiosity and also stupidity compelled me to press that optimize button, to which it did try to defragment <- SUPER DANGER! CANCEL CANCEL.
it was at this point i decided that the entire cloned SSD needs to be nuked, or the SSD will suicide itself to the end of its lifespan. i literally had to take out the Original HDD #2 (thank you, lord of Raid1!), use that to recover the data (after breaking Raid 1, each individual HDDs can be used as readable drives, just not bootable unless the appropriate sata mode was chosen because they seemed tied to the modes where windows was installed)... tl;dr: did a clean install on SSD, this time everything was detected as is. it was time consuming but i averted a disaster (imo).
because i experienced the above, i was wondering if ASUS Clone would be smart enough to automate all the processes and at the same time detect the type differences of hard-drives (or SSDs) and cloning them properly (something which samsung themselves weren't able to do).
if they're able to, i will be very impressed.
if they're not able to... yet, maybe this verbal vomit i typed (sorry!) can serve as inspiration to further improve their software?
no siggy, saw stuff that made me sad.
ROGBot
