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All Intel solid-state drives will now ship with Intel data-migration software, a set of hard-disk data transfer utilities, Acronis said Oct. 6.
Developed by Acronis, the easy-to-use utilities detect the system’s old and new drives and guide the user through the required steps to clone the old drive to the new. Designed to be quick and simple, the data-migration software transfers all the information from the old hard drive, including the operating system, applications, documents and personal settings, Acronis said.
“As solid-state drives become more pervasive in the market, customers will need a solution to migrate their data from their old hard drives to the new SSDs,” Izzy Azeri, vice president of business and corporate development for Acronis, said in a statement.
The free software requires both the old drive and the new drive to be present simultaneously. The new SSD can be connected to the system via an external hard drive case or connector. Cloning generally requires drives to be at least the same capacity. The Acronis tool varies from a number of other products on the market in that the drive sizes don’t matter. The SSD just needs to be able to hold the amount of data currently being stored on the old drive that is being copied over, Acronis said.
Once the drive is cloned, the old drive can be used as a backup drive for the new SSD.
“The Intel data-migration software, powered by Acronis, makes the process of migrating to Intel solid-state drives faster and easier for both home and corporate users,” said Troy Winslow, director of product marketing, Intel NAND Solutions Group.
Cloning hard drives is a faster process than just copying files and can turn a tedious hours-long process into one that takes just minutes, Acronis said.
The free hard-drive cloning tool is currently only for Intel solid-state drives, the companies said. Existing Intel SSD customers can download the Intel data-migration software from Intel’s Download Center site.
The Intel data-migration software complements the SSD Toolbox, which Intel also offers free to its SSD customers. The SSD Toolbox, announced last month, offers various drive-management utilities, including the System Configuration Tuner, Secure Erase and SSD optimization tools.
Intel SSD customers looking for a full-featured backup and recovery solution will receive a promotional rate that can be used toward an upgrade to the Acronic True Image 2011, the company’s disk-imaging tool. True Image protects and recovers all data on the computer, including photos, videos, music, documents and applications.
Western Digital offers a free version of Acronis True Image software on its drives.
There is also a server version of True Image, which allows IT administrators to create an exact disk image of live servers for backup. The server version of the software supports incremental backups and image verification. It also supports dynamic disks and tape drives.
Acronis also offers a freely downloadable disk monitoring tool called Acronis Drive Monitor to all customers.