Very new to using WD Acronis True Image and cloning a hard drive

NotLinus

After the cloning, I remove the Source drive and swap in the target hard drive, should I also remove the Intel Optane chip before rebooting the computer? My desktop pc consists of a spinning HD and the Intel optane SSD to get to an advertised terabyte of storage. The software tells me the cloning operation was successful but one never knows.

PowerSpec_MikeW

@NotLinus

You're going to a partially cached OS on the Optane drive. I would recommend disabling Optane, then cloning the drive. Once you boot to it, enable Optane.

NotLinus

Not sure if I am replying to your answer.  Here I was hoping I might be able to pop out that Optane and replace it with something better.

PowerSpec_MikeW

@NotLinus

If you type @PowerSpec_MikeW I'll get a notification, but I'll respond either way.

If you want the functionality of Optane, which is basically fast drive caching for the HDD. It will depend on your system and specifications. My thought would be to replace the Optane with a much larger NVMe drive, then use a software like PrimoCache to use the SSD as a L2 cache to make the HDD faster. Basically clone the HDD to the new NVMe drive and use the old HDD for data storage. PrimoCache and using the HDD at all is entirely optional. Optane is an interesting technology, it's a fast 32GB cache. It can only predict so much and when you hit the HDD performance suffers. I think an NVMe drive as your main drive would provide overall increased performance.

NotLinus

I probably erred but things happen. So, before I sought out advice on disk cloning, I had not disabled the Optane before using the Acronis software. I haven't yet swapped and tried booting to the target HDD. I feel bad asking this, but will the cloned target HDD contain errors and/or have an incomplete Windows OS on it because of my mistake? Not sure what I should most worry about. The good news is my source HDD is not damaged.

PowerSpec_MikeW

@NotLinus

It shouldn't. Optane cache's data, but there should never be a time when the data on the Optane drive isn't present on the HDD as well. It should be fine either way.