I'd go with an SSD. And I wouldn't clone, but rather make an image backup to put on the new SSD.

Easeus To Do is what I use for backups.

http://www.todo-backup.com/products/home/free-backup-software.htm

A good solid state drive is the best thing you can do to upgrade your system. Unfortunately, they aren't as affordable as an HDD.

Only sensible modern option for HDs is a reasonable sized SSD for the OS...something around the 240+ gig ....and as many platter HDs as you 'need' for storing all the 'junk'...

True words Jafo. I'm currently sporting a 256 GB SSD for the Win7 os drive, a 120 GB SSD for the Win8 OS drive. 

And for storage and backups, I have several platters installed. One 1 TB , one 500 GB, 2 x 300 GB, and one 2 TB external USB 3.0.

4.1 TB's? Wow! You can fit the whole library of congress into there.

yep SSD will be the way to go with my old hd for storage.

image or clone. I want to transfer the hard drive data to the new hd with the intent to be able to plug the new hd in go?

'Image' works....ie. TrueImage 2013 ....as what I'm typing this on is from a transferred image....from a 60 gig SSD to a 240 gig one. [they became cheaper].

Re storage....currently there are 5.5 TB of drives attached...not counting the 240 SSD ...

May I ask you guys: if you are using internal platter-based hard drives, how do you guys cope with heat dissipation? I live in the Southern US and even with AC in the home, I find that I have to remove the side panel of my case to keep my 1.5 TB 7,200 RPM HD between 115-117 F. My PC is on carpet (I know, I know ), but my case seems to be able to provide good ariflow (fans front and back , side to side, as well as top and bottom).

How do you guys cope with heating problems, if you have any?

All depends on the box architecture....Lian Li cases tend to have their HD racks immediately behind the front inlet fan/s so the coolest air is crossing them first...

BTW....hottest it's got to in my end of the woods was 46.2 ... about 2.5 years ago....

I'll have to remember that. My brother is in the process of building his own PC (Case, MB, HD, DVD drive and CPU cooler are all that are needed at this point). I will tell him to check out the Lian Li cases. Thank you.

What's so impressive about 46.2? I am wearing a spring jacket in that kind of weather (I know you mean C not F ).

It was in a state capital [Melbourne] of over 4 million people....not the middle of the outback where temps get somewhat hotter [the B.O.M. recently added a new colour to the weather charts.... 50 to 55 C ] ...

OUCH!!! I've always wanted to go to Australia (a friend of mine was there in Dec and she had a great time), but I HATE the heat...I will definitely be needing a parasol .

Sorry for the derail, gmc2.

My box has 6 case fans, 5 120 mm and one 180 mm. My CPU has a good cooler master cooler on it.

BTW, I can't stress enough about the importance backups. I just lost a 1 TB storage drive and everything on it. It was nearly 3/4 full.

Same here.

My MSi GT780DXR gaming laptop came with two 750GB HDD SATA2 in raid0 for a total capacity of 1.5TB. I decided to upgrade these to two 1TB hybrid solid state SSHD (Seagate ST1000LM014) SATA3 running in raid1. I had been using Casper 7.0 cloning software for backup on an external USB3 1.5TB HDD. Casper does incremental updates which might take 10 minutes or a couple of hours depending upon how busy the defrag has been. The beauty of Casper is that the clone is incremental and bootable.

When the SSHD units arrived, I did a final Casper update and shut down the laptop. I pulled the two HDD units and installed the two SSHD units. I booted up on the external Casper clone. I started Casper and cloned the new SSHD units which took all night.

When I first booted up on the SSHD units, the laptop was really struggling with hard drive activity. I booted up again in safe mode and discovered that the system was initializing the two SSHD units which I guessed to mean that it was checking that the two SSHD units were in fact exact copies. This took about 8 hours, but when it was done I booted up again and logged on.

The boot time is not significantly improved, probably because I don't boot often. However, the applications that I frequently start are very much faster. I am overall quite pleased with the improved performance.

Here are the specs for these SSHD units:

64MB RAM cache

8GB solid state cache

1TB hard disk

SSD is definitely the way to go, but to take full advantage of an SSD drive make sure the SATA ports on your motherboard are SATA 3. If they are SATA 2 you will not notice any performance increase at all. There are some SATA 2 SSD's out there, mostly made by Intel and Crucial. A nice SATA 2 3.0Gbs from Crucial would be this one at 256GB: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3579493&SRCCODE=PRICEGRABBER&cm_mmc_o=2mHCjCVybgwTyz__wyCjCVqHCjCdwwp&cpncode=30-213598518-2 .

My SSD is one of the earlier OCZ 120 GB units which isn't nearly as fast as the newer models but it gets the job done. Most of my programs and data still goes on the platter drive, however.

Not true. A SATA 2 SSD will see a huge performance gain over an HDD on a SATA 2 board.

And a SATA 2 SSD on a SATA 3 board will still see a major gain in performance over an HDD. It will run at SATA 2 speeds though.

Naturally, if you have a SATA 2 mobo, you should still buy a SATA 3 SSD in case you later decide/need to upgrade your mobo to SATA 3.

how to determine sata version?

most current hdd's AND ssd's are sata 3, but the reliable method is check the spec sheet for the drive as SATA 3 IS a wanted feature even though HDDs do not hit the SATA 2 limits, and a SSD (sata2 OR 3) on a sata 2 controller will still show a huge increase over hdd (no significant latency (<.01ms typically) and hitting the controller's throughput limits)

harpo

That'll be listed in the specs of your mobo and of the SSD.