Microsoft Flight Simulator (the 2020 version) is a disk hog. It's
currently occupying 312GB of space on the SSD. And that's just the
core game (and a few - but by no means all - of the official 'world
updates').

And, look, visually it makes sense. MSFS is a gorgeous game, and it
covers the entire world. This isn't the sort of thing you're going to
squeeze into ten or twenty gigabytes of disk-space.

But on the other hand, I am only an occasional MSFS player. Every now
and again I fire it up, whiz across the country-side (usually some
part of the world I've visited in real life), and then leave. Or maybe
I'll show it to a friend to show-off how far computer game graphics
have come over the years. But it's not the sort of game I dedicate a
lot of time too. Is it worth me putting aside a third of a terabyte to
a game that gets visited maybe every month or so (if that often?)

But on the gripping hand... if I do uninstall it, it would take
forever to reinstall the game. While my Internet access is speedy
enough, Microsoft's servers are sloooow (and even if they weren't,
300GB is still a chunk of data to download). So maybe it's just better
to leave it on the disk?

<sigh>

You know what this really means though, don't you?

....

Alexa, how much for a 4TB M.2 SSD?

On Sat, 02 Dec 2023 12:03:48 -0500, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>Microsoft Flight Simulator (the 2020 version) is a disk hog. It's
>currently occupying 312GB of space on the SSD. And that's just the
>core game (and a few - but by no means all - of the official 'world
>updates').

The total space of every game I have installed right now is less then
that.

On Sat, 02 Dec 2023 12:03:48 -0500, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>Microsoft Flight Simulator (the 2020 version) is a disk hog. It's
>currently occupying 312GB of space on the SSD. And that's just the
>core game (and a few - but by no means all - of the official 'world
>updates').
>
>And, look, visually it makes sense. MSFS is a gorgeous game, and it
>covers the entire world. This isn't the sort of thing you're going to
>squeeze into ten or twenty gigabytes of disk-space.
>
>But on the other hand, I am only an occasional MSFS player. Every now
>and again I fire it up, whiz across the country-side (usually some
>part of the world I've visited in real life), and then leave. Or maybe
>I'll show it to a friend to show-off how far computer game graphics
>have come over the years. But it's not the sort of game I dedicate a
>lot of time too. Is it worth me putting aside a third of a terabyte to
>a game that gets visited maybe every month or so (if that often?)
>
>But on the gripping hand... if I do uninstall it, it would take
>forever to reinstall the game. While my Internet access is speedy
>enough, Microsoft's servers are sloooow (and even if they weren't,
>300GB is still a chunk of data to download). So maybe it's just better
>to leave it on the disk?
>
><sigh>
>
>You know what this really means though, don't you?
>
>...
>
>Alexa, how much for a 4TB M.2 SSD?
>
>
>

*--

Mine is 2GB now since day one. It took me about 2 weeks of constant
patching and downloading to initally install the game.

I wouldn't mess with it Spalls unless you want to uninstall it for
good.

-pw

On Sat, 02 Dec 2023 12:03:48 -0500, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

>Alexa, how much for a 4TB M.2 SSD?
>
Ehh, just put it on some spinning rust. It's a old game, it won't need
too much read speed.

I have 5.39 TB of spinning rust. It's the way to go for things that are
that big and don't need crazy read access.

On a side note (because why not?) I did notice that I need to leave at
least *twice* the size of BG3 on my new SSD because the last delta patch
literally rebuilt the entire game. Because there wasn't double BG3 space
on the SSD, it built itself, at an excruciatingly slow pace, *in its
entirety* on the spinning rust drive and then Steam had to copy the whole
thing, once completed, from the rust to the SSD (which was in turn
excruciatingly slow). It would have been faster to just uninstall and
download the whole thing all over again.

So, after that fiasco, I nuked a few aspirational games (or moved them to
the rust drive) and now my 1TB SSD has 315 GB left on it. I leave a lot
of stuff installed for no reason other than "I might play that." I bought
a small 1TB SSD when I purchased BG3 because most things run fine on
rust*, so I didn't need a lot of premium performance space.

My take, SSDs are overrated and "SSD only" games are just the result of
lazy asset retrieval coding. It is the epitomy of hardware advances being
eaten up by lazy programmers doing unnecessary things because they can
and slowing all previous generation machines to a halt in the process. I
used to wonder if this is deliberate, to keep people upgrading, but have
long since concluded it is just laziness and "because we can."

No one lovingly hand crafts machine code any more. Few even bother with
hand-crafted C++. It's probably for the better, but the aged curmudgeon
in me is yelling about how "I walked to school, uphill, both ways."

--
Zag

No one ever said on their deathbed, 'Gee, I wish I had
spent more time alone with my computer.' ~Dan(i) Bunten

* Truth be told even BG3 runs fine on rust. There's a bunch of pop-in in
some locations, but slow hard drive mode covers it, and in my case, I
don't give a rat's arse covers it even better.

On 12/2/23 12:49, Mike S. wrote:
> On Sat, 02 Dec 2023 12:03:48 -0500, Spalls Hurgenson
> <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> Microsoft Flight Simulator (the 2020 version) is a disk hog. It's
>> currently occupying 312GB of space on the SSD. And that's just the
>> core game (and a few - but by no means all - of the official 'world
>> updates').
>
> The total space of every game I have installed right now is less then
> that.

Agreed, my steamapps folder only takes up 70GB, and the biggest game
there is L4D2 at 15GB.
--
user <candycane> is generated from /dev/urandom

Zaghadka <zaghadka@hotmail.com> looked up from reading the entrails of
the porn spammer to utter "The Augury is good, the signs say:
<snip>
> but the aged curmudgeon
>in me is yelling about how "I walked to school, uphill, both ways."

https://twitter.com/MapHobbit/status/962980644929220608/photo/1

Xocyll

On Sat, 02 Dec 2023 13:49:33 -0500, Mike S. <Mike_S@nowhere.com>
wrote:

>On Sat, 02 Dec 2023 12:03:48 -0500, Spalls Hurgenson
><spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>Microsoft Flight Simulator (the 2020 version) is a disk hog. It's
>>currently occupying 312GB of space on the SSD. And that's just the
>>core game (and a few - but by no means all - of the official 'world
>>updates').

>The total space of every game I have installed right now is less then
>that.

Yeah, it really is excessive.

In fairness to Microsoft, I did set aside a 50GB streaming cache (in
addition to its already huge footprint, MSFS also streams textures
from Bing Maps as you play), so the actual /installed/ size is 'only'
260MB.

It's not /really/ a problem yet; I still have several hundred
gigabytes free on that disk. But my instincts are to leave as much of
my disk empty as possible, and I start getting ansty when I pass the
50% mark.

Sadly, while MSFS may be ahead of the curve, it is also likely a
precursor of things to come. 100GB games are becoming increasingly
common, and - while I would have laughed at the idea even a few years
ago - terrabyte-sized games no longer seem so preposterous.

Hmm... come to think of it, even if I did get a new M.2 drive, I've no
easy way to clone it. All my tools are SATA, PATA, SCSI and USB
interfaces

// Alexa, how much for an external M.2 dock? //

On 02/12/2023 23:23, Zaghadka wrote:
> My take, SSDs are overrated and "SSD only" games are just the result of
> lazy asset retrieval coding. It is the epitomy of hardware advances being
> eaten up by lazy programmers doing unnecessary things because they can
> and slowing all previous generation machines to a halt in the process. I
> used to wonder if this is deliberate, to keep people upgrading, but have
> long since concluded it is just laziness and "because we can."

I finaly got an SSD after my somewhat old HDD completly failed and in
terms of the simple thing of Windows starting up, especially from cold,
it's a world apart. For games, yes it's defintely better but not that
much difference, well expect for when World of Tanks went to its new
graphics engine and HDD had loads of problems that for many people made
it unplayable.

Lazy programming, I'm not sure I'd entirely agree with that but yes
there's still a part of of me that misses I have to horribly optimise
this code whether by assembler inserts or writing C to help the
complier. As time went on optimisers in C became far, far better
although I still have a habit of if I can write a for loop that counts
down instead of up then that saves some instructions even though the
optimiser wil do that.

Saying that, optimisers can be a pain when you need to say no I realise
this doesn't make sense to you but our product requires that no
sensitive data is reused so must be cleared.

Zaghadka <zaghadka@hotmail.com> wrote:
>Ehh, just put it on some spinning rust. It's a old game, it won't need
>too much read speed.
>
>I have 5.39 TB of spinning rust. It's the way to go for things that are
>that big and don't need crazy read access.

I have a 8TB hard drive, recently upgraded from 3TB because it was full,
just for games. I install games on my 2TB SSD, but I move games I'm no
longer playing to the hard drive when necessary to make room. Steam has
own built-in support for moving games between drives, but for games from
other stores, I have a batch script that moves them with robocopy and
junction points.

>So, after that fiasco, I nuked a few aspirational games (or moved them to
>the rust drive) and now my 1TB SSD has 315 GB left on it. I leave a lot
>of stuff installed for no reason other than "I might play that." I bought
>a small 1TB SSD when I purchased BG3 because most things run fine on
>rust*, so I didn't need a lot of premium performance space.

I have you seen the prices of SSDs these days, by the way? They're stupid
cheap right now. You should be able to find a 2TB SSD for $100 US or
less on sale. The expection is also that SSDs prices are only going to
go up because flash chip manufacturers have drastically cut production
after chip prices plumetted this year.

--
l/ // Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo] rridge@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/ http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca:11068/
db //

On Sun, 3 Dec 2023 16:47:55 -0000 (UTC), in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
Ross Ridge wrote:

>Zaghadka <zaghadka@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>Ehh, just put it on some spinning rust. It's a old game, it won't need
>>too much read speed.
>>
>>I have 5.39 TB of spinning rust. It's the way to go for things that are
>>that big and don't need crazy read access.
>
>I have a 8TB hard drive, recently upgraded from 3TB because it was full,
>just for games. I install games on my 2TB SSD, but I move games I'm no
>longer playing to the hard drive when necessary to make room. Steam has
>own built-in support for moving games between drives, but for games from
>other stores, I have a batch script that moves them with robocopy and
>junction points.
>
The drive with 5.39TiB left is a 9.09TiB drive. I'm too lazy to swap
games between SSD and HDD, so most of them I just play off of the HDD.
Anything bigger than 25GB (real GB!) tends to go on the SSD though.
Biggest game on the HDD is ~3GB.

(Sorry for the TiB stuff, but I just can't call it a 10TB drive and live
with myself. It is ~9TB if we don't use the marketing figures.)

>>So, after that fiasco, I nuked a few aspirational games (or moved them to
>>the rust drive) and now my 1TB SSD has 315 GB left on it. I leave a lot
>>of stuff installed for no reason other than "I might play that." I bought
>>a small 1TB SSD when I purchased BG3 because most things run fine on
>>rust*, so I didn't need a lot of premium performance space.
>
>I have you seen the prices of SSDs these days, by the way? They're stupid
>cheap right now. You should be able to find a 2TB SSD for $100 US or
>less on sale. The expection is also that SSDs prices are only going to
>go up because flash chip manufacturers have drastically cut production
>after chip prices plumetted this year.

Oh, yeah. I picked up a 931GiB NVMe drive earlier this year for $51 when
I bought BG3.

It suits my needs. Most games I don't mind running off of rust - even BG3
- but I splurged with an Amazon gift card I had received. Also picked up
an extra fan (Noctua FTW), a GTX 3060Ti, and a 5 1/4" hot swap cage. A WD
Black 9TB drive comes with no center mounting holes (nice of them to tell
me) and my drive cage depends on those.*

Now I can *hot swap* my big data drives! I've got the 6TB in the closet
ready to do archival stuff.

--
Zag

No one ever said on their deathbed, 'Gee, I wish I had
spent more time alone with my computer.' ~Dan(i) Bunten

________________________________________________________________________
* Basically I was running the thing mounted by two screws (and hanging
out of the drive cage). It was hanging like that because it made a sound
like a jackhammer if you locked the drive mount into the cage, even with
the noise reduction grommets. Two screws=a whole lotta bouncing.

I fixed the bad mount with the hot swap cage in an external 5 1/4" slot,
and now it makes more noise than when it was hanging out of the internal
cage, but less than when it was fully locked in. It isn't going to
vibrate itself to death either.

Doing all this allowed me to duck the case wiring really well too, by
removing all the drive cage mounts, I got a nice clear space in the front
of the case. I still can't mount any video card bigger than 10.5" though
(my EVGA GTX 1080 SC just fit) because the cage itself is not removable.
So I hung the Noctua 120mm off of the cage, where there are fan mounting
holes, and now my heat problems are solved.

On Sun, 03 Dec 2023 11:18:16 -0500, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

>Sadly, while MSFS may be ahead of the curve, it is also likely a
>precursor of things to come. 100GB games are becoming increasingly
>common, and - while I would have laughed at the idea even a few years
>ago - terrabyte-sized games no longer seem so preposterous.

That require 64GB of memory. But 64GB should be enough for anyone!

Talos II weighs in at 70.65GB, btw. I have some hope for the future.

I want the option to remove 4k textures from the disk, though. I don't
game at 4k. I think it's high time that we went back to the idea of
standard resolution and high resolution textures as a selectable option.

--
Zag

No one ever said on their deathbed, 'Gee, I wish I had
spent more time alone with my computer.' ~Dan(i) Bunten

On 06/12/2023 12:36, Zaghadka wrote:
> On Sun, 03 Dec 2023 11:18:16 -0500, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
> Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
>
>> Sadly, while MSFS may be ahead of the curve, it is also likely a
>> precursor of things to come. 100GB games are becoming increasingly
>> common, and - while I would have laughed at the idea even a few years
>> ago - terrabyte-sized games no longer seem so preposterous.
>
> That require 64GB of memory. But 64GB should be enough for anyone!
>
> Talos II weighs in at 70.65GB, btw. I have some hope for the future.
>
> I want the option to remove 4k textures from the disk, though. I don't
> game at 4k. I think it's high time that we went back to the idea of
> standard resolution and high resolution textures as a selectable option.
>

I presume that's just a problem of going to UE5.

On Sunday, December 3, 2023 at 8:18:30 AM UTC-8, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

>
> Hmm... come to think of it, even if I did get a new M.2 drive, I've no
> easy way to clone it. All my tools are SATA, PATA, SCSI and USB
> interfaces

We bought a number of different tools for that at work, some of them
didn't work at all, while the ones that did the M.2 drive overheated
rather quickly and quit working. I actually burned my finger on one.
It started working and we were able to finish cloning it after leaving
it unplugged for about a half hour. In any case it doesn't seem
good for the long term use for them to get that hot, which is part
of why I've been avoiding buying one.

The only safe way of cloning them I've found is creating a backup
image with a Clonezilla boot usb, to another usb stick, while the
drive remains in the computer, then restoring it to the same or
another computer.

- Justisaur

Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com> wrote:
>We bought a number of different tools for that at work, some of them
>didn't work at all, while the ones that did the M.2 drive overheated
>rather quickly and quit working. I actually burned my finger on one.
>It started working and we were able to finish cloning it after leaving
>it unplugged for about a half hour. In any case it doesn't seem
>good for the long term use for them to get that hot, which is part
>of why I've been avoiding buying one.

That sounds like the NVMe drive was defective, or the case it was in
was really hot or something. They're supposed to throttle themselves
to prevent overheating and shutting down, just like CPUs.

--
l/ // Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo] rridge@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/ http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca:11068/
db //

On 12/8/23 16:41, Ross Ridge wrote:
> Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com> wrote:
>> We bought a number of different tools for that at work, some of them
>> didn't work at all, while the ones that did the M.2 drive overheated
>> rather quickly and quit working. I actually burned my finger on one.
>> It started working and we were able to finish cloning it after leaving
>> it unplugged for about a half hour. In any case it doesn't seem
>> good for the long term use for them to get that hot, which is part
>> of why I've been avoiding buying one.
>
> That sounds like the NVMe drive was defective, or the case it was in
> was really hot or something. They're supposed to throttle themselves
> to prevent overheating and shutting down, just like CPUs.
>

Do they slow down when they detect high temps or is it just a speed limit?
--
user <candycane> is generated from /dev/urandom

On Friday, December 8, 2023 at 2:41:29 PM UTC-8, Ross Ridge wrote:
> Justisaur <just...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >We bought a number of different tools for that at work, some of them
> >didn't work at all, while the ones that did the M.2 drive overheated
> >rather quickly and quit working. I actually burned my finger on one.
> >It started working and we were able to finish cloning it after leaving
> >it unplugged for about a half hour. In any case it doesn't seem
> >good for the long term use for them to get that hot, which is part
> >of why I've been avoiding buying one.

> That sounds like the NVMe drive was defective, or the case it was in
> was really hot or something. They're supposed to throttle themselves
> to prevent overheating and shutting down, just like CPUs.

Wasn't in a case, it was a little connector, it was all the drives, a couple
different brands, no samsung though. They were still hot in the
computers, but not so hot they shut off.

I suspect there's some logic in the controllers on the computers that's
missing from the device used to attach them to the sata cloner. There
isn't a good way to attach them externally.

- Justisaur

Ross Ridge wrote:
> That sounds like the NVMe drive was defective, or the case it was in
> was really hot or something. They're supposed to throttle themselves
> to prevent overheating and shutting down, just like CPUs.
candycanearter07 <no@thanks.net> wrote:
>Do they slow down when they detect high temps or is it just a speed limit?

It's temperature controlled, there's a temperature they'll slow down to
prevent overheating, and a even higher temperature where they'll shutdown
completely to avoid damaging themselves. CPUs work the same way.

The big problem with NVMe drives is that flash memory chips haven't been
getting smaller in a long time. They use high-voltages to erase their
memory cells, and this means the space between the cells can't shink
beyond a certain size. To increase storage density flash memory chips
have had to stack multiple layers of cells and this doesn't help with
heat dissiption. This also means they haven't benefit from the energy
efficiency improvements other kinds of chips have gained from shrinking
transitors, so faster flash memory means hotter flash memory.

Add in increasing interface speeds, most NVMe drives using PCI Express
5.0 have heat sinks, some have active cooling, and you get drives that can
get very hot indeed. It doesn't help that the places where they're put
on the motherboard often don't get great cooling. So termal throttling
is a must with NVMe drives.

--
l/ // Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo] rridge@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/ http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca:11068/
db //

Zaghadka <zaghadka@hotmail.com> wrote:
>It suits my needs. Most games I don't mind running off of rust - even BG3
>- but I splurged with an Amazon gift card I had received. Also picked up
>an extra fan (Noctua FTW), a GTX 3060Ti, and a 5 1/4" hot swap cage. A WD
>Black 9TB drive comes with no center mounting holes (nice of them to tell
>me) and my drive cage depends on those.*

Oh, yah, I've heard of drives like that. They don't have the center
mounting holes because they use a taller than normal stack of platters,
and there isn't room for the holes.

--
l/ // Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo] rridge@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/ http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca:11068/
db //

On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 07:13:13 -0000 (UTC), in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
Ross Ridge wrote:

>some have active cooling

Lol. Just put a few more nodes on the AIO chain. Problem solved?

I'm just imagining all the fans in that PC, otherwise.

I think ultimately, there should be something like SIMM slots for these
things, so at least both surfaces are exposed to air. Did anyone think
this through at all? I have one sitting under my freaking graphics card!

--
Zag

No one ever said on their deathbed, 'Gee, I wish I had
spent more time alone with my computer.' ~Dan(i) Bunten

Zaghadka <zaghadka@hotmail.com> wrote:
>I think ultimately, there should be something like SIMM slots for these
>things, so at least both surfaces are exposed to air. Did anyone think
>this through at all? I have one sitting under my freaking graphics card!

The M.2 form factor was designed for laptops, which would presumably
include whatever heat sinks and fans necessary to cool whatever got put
in them. It doesn't work as well for desktops, where standard motherboard
layouts don't give much option for where they can be put.

The primary M.2 slot between the video card and the CPU is actually not a
bad place for it, as it can benefit the air flow from the CPU cooler fans.
But only cheap downward blowing CPU coolers will provide good air flow
there and liquid coolers won't provide any at all.

I think we may be hitting a thermal limit on how high bus speeds can go.
Even the highest end video cards these days only support PCI Express 4.0
and midrange cards only support it at x8. As mentioned before PCIe 5.0
NVMe drives run so hot some of them have fans. To fully exploit PCIe 6.0
speeds NVMe drives might have to switch to a regular PCIe add-in card
form factor so they can use cooling solutions similar to video cards.
On the other hand it'll been even longer before video cards adopt the
PCIe 6.0 standard, and then maybe only the top-of-line cards.

That could make PCI Express 6.0 a luxury product, only available very
high-end PCs with very high-end CPUs and motherboards. Maybe even
something only available in server and workstation computers, like HBM
memory. Improvements in chip making have become slower and slower and
yielding smaller and smaller benefits, so I don't think we can depend
on that automatically making future PCI Express versions practical in
desktop PCs. Even if chip technology progresses a lot faster than I'm
assuming, I don't see how PCI Express 7.0 can become mainstream.

--
l/ // Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo] rridge@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/ http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca:11068/
db //

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> writes:

> Hmm... come to think of it, even if I did get a new M.2 drive, I've no
> easy way to clone it. All my tools are SATA, PATA, SCSI and USB
> interfaces

As I needed to do some open heart surgery on my main SSDs partitioning
some time ago, I had a similar problem. My main SSD is only 1 TB so it
was easy to buy a 2 TB SSD to clone a backup copy to. And since I've had
an almost-USB stick sized case for an SSD from Chinese outfit "Jeyi" for
almost a decade, I got one of their newer USB to M.2 cases with 10 Gbps
USB3 interface.

So with these in hand and the crude but effective Linux tool "dd", I
just cloned my 1 TB SSD. Speed of the cloning was a disappointment
though, it wasn't much faster than to an HD. I don't know why, for sure
the 2 TB drive was cheap. I guess I should've wiped it first or whatever
it's called, telling it to empty all blocks so they're ready for writing.

In the end, all the partition resize/move/delete/create operations went
without issue so I didn't need my backup after all.

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> writes:

> Hmm... come to think of it, even if I did get a new M.2 drive, I've no
> easy way to clone it. All my tools are SATA, PATA, SCSI and USB
> interfaces

As I needed to do some open heart surgery on my main SSDs partitioning
some time ago, I had a similar problem. My main SSD is only 1 TB so it
was easy to buy a 2 TB SSD to clone a backup copy to. And since I've had
an almost-USB stick sized case for an SSD from Chinese outfit "Jeyi" for
almost a decade, I got one of their newer USB to M.2 cases with 10 Gbps
USB3 interface.

So with these in hand and the crude but effective Linux tool "dd", I
just cloned my 1 TB SSD. Speed of the cloning was a disappointment
though, it wasn't much faster than to an HD. I don't know why, for sure
the 2 TB drive was cheap. I guess I should've wiped it first or whatever
it's called, telling it to empty all blocks so they're ready for writing.

In the end, all the partition resize/move/delete/create operations went
without issue so I didn't need my backup after all.

Anssi Saari <anssi.saari@usenet.mail.kapsi.fi> wrote:
>So with these in hand and the crude but effective Linux tool "dd" ...

That's fine for making a backup, but you don't want to use dd to clone an
old drive to a new drive if the new drive is an SSD. The wear leveling
algorithms used by SSDs work best if they know what parts of the SSDs
are in use and which aren't. The dd commmand has no idea what parts of
the disk its copying is unused and will copy everything meaning that
the new SSD will think every sector dd writes is being used, even if
the old drive had half its space free.

I cloned two SSDs recently, one NVMe drive from an old hard drive, and a
newer bigger SATA SSD from an older smaller SATA SSD. I used robocopy
under Windows to do a file by file copy in both cases. The first case
was a data drive, so it a was straightforward copy from one drive to
another, using a network share as the source.

The second case was a boot drive so was a lot more involved. I booted a
Windows install DVD to do the copy, created a boot and Windows parition on
the new SSD, copied the old boot partition to the new one with robocopy,
and did the same with the Windows partition. To make the result actually
bootable I had to use bcdedit on the new boot partition so it would
use the new SSD to boot from, and then modify the registry on the new
Windows partition so it would mount the new Windows partition instead
of the old one.

I wouldn't recommend people clone their Windows boot drives they way I
did, but for data drives robocopy works well. It's also how I used to
clone my hard drives when upgrading them, doing it this way results in
your new drive being perfectly defragmented, with not only every file
in a single fragment, but also every file in the same directory located
near each other on disk.
--
l/ // Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo] rridge@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/ http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca:11068/
db //

rridge@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Ross Ridge) writes:

> Anssi Saari <anssi.saari@usenet.mail.kapsi.fi> wrote:
>>So with these in hand and the crude but effective Linux tool "dd" ...
>
> That's fine for making a backup, but you don't want to use dd to clone an
> old drive to a new drive if the new drive is an SSD. The wear leveling
> algorithms used by SSDs work best if they know what parts of the SSDs
> are in use and which aren't. The dd commmand has no idea what parts of
> the disk its copying is unused and will copy everything meaning that
> the new SSD will think every sector dd writes is being used, even if
> the old drive had half its space free.

Sigh. You can trust I'm smart enough to not clone a half full drive like
this. But even then, it only causes an insignificant reduction on a
cheap drive's life.

Oh, I considered using partclone or other tools which are smart enough
to copy only relevant parts of a partition but at the same time I
would've lost a fast and easy ability to check that the backup copy is
correct. Same goes for restoring.