How to clone SSD with Linux Mint 18 to a larger SSD

I searched hard for the most effective way of achieving this goal.

My research suggests, that using dd is a rather deprecated method.

In my case, as said, the target SSD drive is bigger than the source SSD. And for cloning pv utility can be used achieving maximum speed available.

Open terminal and become root (su); if you have sudo enabled, you may also do for example sudo -i; see man sudo for all options):

$ sudo -i

Supposing the original drive is sdX and the target sdY, create an exact copy with:

# pv < /dev/sdX > /dev/sdY

Not only it is shorter and simplier, it is faster by default with no additional settings needed, I achieved an average speed of 400MB/s with ordinary SATA SSD drives.

And as an additional benefit, it shows progress.

If you want to run this with sudo, you have to elaborate a little:

$ sudo sh -c 'pv < /dev/sdX > /dev/sdY'

PS: It is not true as in the other answer that man needs to install GRUB after this. All data is copied, even the boot loader.


gdisk or fdisk afterwards needed

I absolutely forgot to add that I always run gdisk (GPT) and just do w for write, it always fixes necessary things. Never used MBR with Linux, so fdisk can't confirm, but it probably works the same.