I have a 64GB Crucial M4 SSD that I am going to switch out for a 250GB Samsung 840 drive.
I have an OS image of the 64GB SSD using Win7 backup/restore and I am wondering if it will be OK to restore that image to the 250GB SSD, or if there will be any issues with alignment, seeing as the size and brand of the SSD are different?
Would I be better off just doing a fresh install, or maybe just using a 3rd party tool to migrate to OS from the 64GB SSD to the 250GB one?
Apart from having to increase the size of the resulting partition afterwards, Windows 7 should handle it well enough. I've only used Acronis True Image myself, which might be worth buying (their demo version is no longer fully functional like it used to be) if doing this kind of operation often, or for more advanced operations like imaging a drive that includes an OEM recovery partition.
The following page seems to have the Windows 7 image restore described well: http://www.pagestart.com/win7bckuprstrnhd072610.html
I am thinking the easiest way is probably to use Paragon Disk Manager 14 trial to migrate the OS to the other SSD and let it take care of everything for me.
I used it on my laptop to migrate Win 8.1 to an mSATA drive a while back and it worked perfectly.