Quoting:

Many open source and commercial cloning tools will do a *much* faster 
and more efficient duplicate.  End excerpt.

I assume faster and efficient is by comparison to a drive cloning device 
with two slots, one for the source, and the other target (clone).  If 
so, which cloning tools do you recommend, either licensed for free or 
for fee?  Do these run on a single drive system, cloning the internal 
single drive to an external USB raw device (e.g., /dev/foo but not 
mounted)?  A long time ago I would use dd from the drive to be cloned to 
the target, both appearing as /dev but neither mounted (so that the 
images would be "static" and fixed).

As for the "hilarity", I have done this -- carefully -- pre-UUID when 
the external clone would appear as /dev/blah /dev/blah1 /dev/blah2 with 
/dev/blah"i" being the i-th partition and /dev/blah the entire drive 
including any hard-boot sectors or likewise "reserved" (visible under 
gparted or the text terminal equivalent).  Say /dev/blah1 was /usr, the 
mount for /dev/blah1 to avoid hilarity might be /dev/usbblah1 , and the 
like.

On 5/11/21 9:39 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> On Tue, May 11, 2021 at 11:01 PM Yasha Karant <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> I want to reduce the booting time interval and other disc access time
>> interval.  I have a 2 TByte SSD drive that has the same physical form
>> factor as 2 Tbyte rotating media hard drive.  I also have a device that
>> will accept each drive and  make a "bit by bit" copy from the source to
>> target drive.
> 
> Never assume that this will work, because hard drive manufacturers
> cannot count. i.e, whether a "2 TB drive" is actually 2^41 bits in
> size depends on how much space is being used for error correction, bad
> sectors, and the like. Many open source and commercial cloning tools
> will do a *much* faster and more efficient duplicate.
> 
>> The current drive is the conventional harddrive. May I clone the
>> harddrive onto the bare SSD drive and then install, or will the machine
>> fail to boot/run because of UUID descriptors?  Will these clone or not?
>> Most of the file systems in each partition are Linux XFS.
> 
> As long as /etc/fstab sees matching UUID's or even filesystem labels,
> you should be OK in that sense. It's when you mount them both
> physically on the same hardware at the same time that hilarity can and
> will ensue.
>