I'm currently running 3 HDD's in my system which are 1x 250gb (boot drive and slowest), 1x 500gb (music and downloaded programs) and 1x 1TB (video & movies). I'm looking to Buy another HDD and swap the slow boot drive for the 500gb disc. I don't want to go through a complete re-install and was looking to clone the disc. Will this allow me to simply change the drive to boot from and have a stable system? What software is best for this? Will I really notice a difference with a slightly faster drive? The current boot drive has 100gb of free space and the cloning would be simply for the speed increase. If I wouldn't notice, then I probably wouldn't do it.

Drives are

250gb Samsung SP2504c

500gb WDC WD5000AAKS-00TMA0

1TB ST31000340AS

clonezilla - boots from a live cd and will do exactly what you need.

You also need to consider whether the HD speed is actually a bottleneck or whether the CPU/motherboard or memory may actually be the bottleneck. From a quick google the only difference between the two drives is the buffer size, realistically I don't think you will see any difference.

The current boot drive has 100gb of free space and the cloning would be simply for the speed increase. If I wouldn't notice, then I probably wouldn't do it.

The new hd drive that you're going to buy should ideally be faster than any of the others currently in the machine so consider using that as the boot drive and the old ones as storage. Why not consider a 10k hd as the boot drive then it will really fly!

As trundlenut suggests, check the rest of the machine first. Also ensure that you have at least 2gb of physical ram as thats sufficient for most tasks.

Acronis TrueImage - I've used that before for just this task and it does the trick. Or you could use Ghost.

WD Caviar 500, 32Mb cache, SATA-300 7200 would be what I'd go for. Or perhaps a Spinpoint of the same spec - perhaps a *little* quieter but not much in it, IME.

Steve