swap the HD on my laptop with an SSD of same size [CLOSED]

Question

I plan to swap the HD on my laptop with an SSD of same size. Will it work OK if I dd the HD to an external HD, swap the HD with the SSD and dd the contents back to the SSD? I believe I can use knoppix to the process.

Answer 1

The best tool to use for the purpose would be CloneZilla instead of plain "dd".

Answer 2

Technically it would work, but you'll most probably encounter a huge performance drop. Partitions on SSD drives need to be properly aligned to the block boundaries (4k), because they use a blocksize of 4k (at least the ones I own), similar to the WD "advanced format".
Most of the rotational drives (except those who use "advanced format" or similar) use a 512 byte blocksize. DDing such a disk to a solid state device could be a bad idea.
The best way to do it in my opinion is to backup all partitions using rsync (*), partitioning and formatting the SSD with proper alignment, using rsync to transfer the data back, and simply re-install GRUB2. I have done that quite often, without any problems.
(*) rsync -avxHSAX /source/ /target
Don't forget to switch to the deadline elevator, it works a lot better than cfq in combination with non-rotational drives.