[mdlug] Adding SSD to existing system

[Jonathan Billings]

On Mon, Jan 06, 2014 at 12:06:09PM -0500, Robert Citek wrote:
> - dd everything from the HDD to SSD  (e.g. dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb)
> - power off, remove HDD, and reboot system

Using 'dd' to transfer filesystems from spinning disks to SSD will
most likely leave you with a non-optimal filesystem.  Block size and
partition offset will most likely be wrong.  You won't have the
SSD-specific features turned on anywhere, either.

'dd' also copies every block, regardless of whether it's allocated to
a filesystem, empty, deleted data, missing sectors, etc.

I pretty much never use 'dd' to copy disks unless I'm making a
last-ditch rescue of a failing drive, and 'ddrescue' is much easier to
use, if it's available.  'dd' can be useful if you are copying
non-linux filesystems (like ntfs) or cloning a drive to identical
hardware, too, but I rarely encounter those situations.

I would suggest using backup tools, LVM migrations or just create a
new OS and copy user data and configuration files.  Your OS probably
already knows how to partition SSDs optimally.

-- 
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>