[mdlug] Adding SSD to existing system

[Robert Citek]

On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 12:19 PM, Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org> wrote:
> 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.

Agreed.  If I had my preference, I would rebuild the system using LVM
and then migrate the content over.  And in the future I may do that
and tinker with setting to make it better, stronger, faster.  But in
my case, I was in a pinch and this process worked good-enough with
minimal effort.  Even with non-optimal settings, the SSD drive
out-performs the HDD.

Regards,
- Robert