SSD Clone Question(s) - Windows 11

It's finally time to upgrade an old Samsung SATA M.2 SSD to a PCIE/NVME drive on an old Z270 motherboard. I'm going to put the new drive in an external enclosure and clone the current drive using Macrium Reflect....I have a few questions...it's been a long time since I've cloned a drive.

- I'm not sure if brand new drives come with GPT or MBR partition table. Current drive is GPT. Will Macrium automatically clone partition table format too or do I need to verify/set (and even format) the new drive prior to cloning?
- Will cloning deactivate my Windows? If so, I assume I just call the phone number and use my original WIndows 10 Product Key?
- Since the new drive is larger, I assume I'll need to use a Partition Manager to move the Recover partition behind unallocated space to extend the C:drive, correct? Do I need to disable and reenable it prior to moving? I likely use MiniTool
- On newer drives (PCIE3 and 4), is overprovisioning still recommended? If so, what % (1TB drive).

Thanks.

1. Reflect will sort out gpt automatically during clone process

2. Cloning will not deactive the licence provided you are using same mobo.

3. You can sort out sizes using Reflect during cloning. I showed how in another post.See post 8 in Trouble cloning a ssd to a larger one - Windows 10 Help Forums

4. Overprovisioning - frankly I do not care anymore. Drives have such a long life now, it probably makes little difference..

Some say it can inprove performance but as nvmes are so much faster, I doubt anybody could tell.

I cloned a drive yesterday using a free limited life Reflect. The drive had very little more than just an up to date W11 pro, and the new drive works perfectly, but what puzzled me was the new drive is 8 Gb smaller than the original one. Both are SSD's, and so far I haven't been able to tell the difference, all the programs have cloned, including favourites and Firefox, my default browser is exactly the same, all settings have been retained.

cereberus said:

4. Overprovisioning - frankly I do not care anymore. Drives have such a long life now, it probably makes little difference..

Some say it can inprove performance but as nvmes are so much faster, I doubt anybody could tell.

Click to expand...

It makes a HUGE diff if your storage is about to get full.

It is all about marketing tricks. A 240GB SSD is not actually 240*1024*1024*1024 bytes, as is the correct, but it is 240*1000*1000*1000 bytes, that is why you see a smaller size in File Explorer. Some manufacturers add a little more space (which is still less than actual 240GB) hence the 8GB difference between same capacity drives.

SlicEnDicE said:

It makes a HUGE diff if your storage is about to get full.

Click to expand...

So you have two options:
1. Set aside unallocated space that the OS does not have access to, and your smaller partition operates with limited free space which slows down the OS. OR
2. Get a larger SSD which allows for more free space that the OS does have access to and not suffer from the performance hit cause by limited free space.

I'll skip overprovisioning and keep my SSD's large enough for the OS to operate efficiently.

If you clone to a larger disk with Macrium Reflect, copy the Windows partition (usually the larger) and then before copy the remaining partitions expand it to take all the available space minus the required space for the rest partitions. Then copy the remaining partitions and proceed with the clone. I don't know how to do it in newer versions, but in Macrium Reflect 7 you click on Change partition properties and type the desired free space at the end at the respective field. Similarly when you clone to a smaller disk, shrink the Windows partition before copying the remaining partitions.

tinmar49 said:

I cloned a drive yesterday using a free limited life Reflect.

Click to expand...

If you used Reflect Trial, then at the end of 30 days it prompts you to purchase. If you decline it reverts to Reflect Free which never expires but has a few Premium features disabled. The cloning you used is NOT a Premium feature. Many find Reflect Free does all they need.

mccnavy said:

On newer drives (PCIE3 and 4), is overprovisioning still recommended? If so, what % (1TB drive).

Click to expand...

Over provisioning is the deliberate setting aside of unallocated drive space. This unused space help the drive's wear levelling algorithms to work efficiently and extend the SSD's life. Wear levelling can equally well use any free space in allocated partitions, so unless you intend to fill the drive completely then over provisioning is unnecessary. About 10% free space should be sufficient.

Overprovisioning is a safety feature. I don't want my data to get corrupt when the drive is close to its EOL or disk might be almost full. You guys do you...but I will keep my drives working. I use the same technique on my NAS and you should too. When drive(partition) is getting full, I will order a new drive, but meanwhile I can expand the partition enough so that I can fit the extra data while waiting for new drive to arrive.

SlicEnDicE said:

Overprovisioning is a safety feature. I don't want my data to get corrupt when the drive is close to its EOL or disk might be almost full. You guys do you...but I will keep my drives working. I use the same technique on my NAS and you should too. When drive(partition) is getting full, I will order a new drive, but meanwhile I can expand the partition enough so that I can fit the extra data while waiting for new drive to arrive.

Click to expand...

Frankly, I have not bothered with this for years. If I get within 85% of capacity, and cannot free up any significant space, I know it is time to get a larger drive. Whenever I have needed to do this, the new drive has always had much more capacity than original drive for same cost or less.

Regardless of overprovisioning, you need a certain amount of free space to handle temporary files. In any case with modern resilience, overprovisioning is pretty much a thing of the past. I just do a regular health check of drive, and all metrics indicate drive will outlast me, so why stress myself (shortening my life expectancy), worrying about something that is practically irrellevant these days?

Any SSD performance start to degrade when over 50% of total space is used...when you've written to the disk one whole cycle (eg. the full drive capacity) the perfomance start to degrade even further. Some vendors use overprovisioning in their drives to circumvent huge performance losses. This is why some drives are reported with 480GB instead of 500GB etc...overprovisioning make a huge difference in performance. Even with just 7% overprovisioning you may gain over 30% more write performance, count in aging/multiple write cycles and the performance gain is even greater.

We could dig deep into SSD specs, inner workings and perfomance test data, but at this point it seems it's just beating a dead horse.

EDIT: OP is especially important for Windows system drive...or wherever you put your pagefile. Windows loves to write data there. Ever wondered why Windows slow down over time? Here lies one answer out of many.

Disk health is not the only reason to get a larger disk. If you have more than 70% of the disk full, performance degrades because there is not enough space for the swap file and other system operations.

When an 8TB SSD isn't enough anymore...

I have a 512GB SSD for my system, 4TB hard disk for my videos and an 8TB hard disk for all my downloads. Also separate disks to archive older data. I should be OK for some months

I have similar setup...but 512GB system drive isn't enough for me anymore. Even on my phone over half of 512GB internal storage is in use, and I need it all there.

Downloads folder I purge every now and then...and it's the least of my concerns anyways...

SlicEnDicE said:

Any SSD performance start to degrade when over 50% of total space is used...when you've written to the disk one whole cycle (eg. the full drive capacity) the perfomance start to degrade even further. Some vendors use overprovisioning in their drives to circumvent huge performance losses. This is why some drives are reported with 480GB instead of 500GB etc...overprovisioning make a huge difference in performance. Even with just 7% overprovisioning you may gain over 30% more write performance, count in aging/multiple write cycles and the performance gain is even greater.

We could dig deep into SSD specs, inner workings and perfomance test data, but at this point it seems it's just beating a dead horse.

EDIT: OP is especially important for Windows system drive...or wherever you put your pagefile. Windows loves to write data there. Ever wondered why Windows slow down over time? Here lies one answer out of many.

Click to expand...

I put my pagefile on a different drive as my 2nd NVME has a much higher write resilience.

The whole performance issue and space is really only important on the OS drive. Data drives are largely static I can assure you performance losses were neglible on my nvme drives even when my original 500 GB drive was filled to over 80%.

I never fill my main 1 TB OS drive anywhere near maximum capacity - I partition drive so I have a 250 GB partition for OS plus programs, and a 750 partition for data. Eventually that partition did get quite full, so I bought a second NVME which holds most vhdx files and backups.

If I ever see any performance decrease due to capacity on OS drive - I will adjust partition size.

To me the worst setup is all data and OS, pagefiles, hibernation files (I turn this off) all on a single drive.

For all I know my nvme drives have provisioning automatically built in.

I have yet to see any articles that verify the benefit of provisioning on nvme drives, and I have never detected performance reductions one drive is over 50% full. It always comes down to real world use versus theoretical cases.

Performance reduction is too small to notice on SSD but you can see it in old mechanical hard disks.

Are you guys only looking at read speeds here? I circulate a lot of data daily...and performance degrade at a noticeable rate. My laptop system drive has degraded to half write performance over 3 years, and about 30% on my desktop PC which has twice the capacity. Essentially identical setups what comes to data and apps.

I don't do heavy use of my main computer (see my 2nd system specs) due to lack of time. I usually do some video editing (ad removal, crop-resize, convert to another format etc). All videos are on a separate USB disk, not on the SSD to avoid wearing it and filling it. Besides rendering speed is not too high to see the difference between the SSD and the USB disk.