I'm not sure why that didn't occur to me earlier. So the short version is that I just caved and bought an enclosure (this one: ) because a) the SSD was smaller than my Windows partition and b) it seemed like an SATA to USB cable was about the same price or more expensive than an enclosure and c) perhaps most importantly, the light bulb that finally went on in my head was that if I had an enclosure, I would now have an extra hard drive once I put my old drive in the enclosure.
I thought I'd come back and give an update in case anyone else runs into this. Response by poster: Thanks for all the suggestions. Posted by mrg at 11:02 AM on July 2, 2015
Someone else may be able to explain this in more detail I've been out of the Linux-on-things-that-aren't-expendable-VMs for a while now and have no idea what the details would be anymore. Whether or not that'll work for you depends on whether or not you want to or can crack open the case and swap the drives out, and/or whether or not you care about whatever warranty is on the external still.Īnother possibility, if you have enough free space on the external: get a Linux rescue-type live CD burnt, boot from it, clone drive into a file on the external, power everything down and put the SSD in, boot from the rescue CD again and clone the file onto the SSD. So, you kinda already have a SATA-to-USB converter. To clarify, these kinds of things are nearly 100% of the time just a case with a regular drive in it, so it's probably got a SATA HDD in it already.
What kind of drive is the external portable one? A purpose-built one? There is a potential possibility that you can crack it open and just slot the SSD in, and then clone your drive onto it from there. Is there a way I can do this? posted by ashworth to Computers & Internet (10 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite my HDD cloned to the SSD (minus the Linux is ok and probably even desirable) a new Samsung SSD that I would like to be using right away. an external portable drive with 200GB free space I also recently partitioned this to try out Linux - I don't need the Linux partition to transfer. Asus U56E laptop with about 120GB used (files plus Windows). I have an external USB drive with a lot of free space, is there any way I can clone to that? Or is there some other workaround I can use without having to wait a few more days for shipping? I kind of wanted to get this done today and having looked at Staples, Best Buy, etc., it looks like they all only have these cables online. I've done some Googling and everything I've read assumes an enclosure or SATA to USB cable.