SDD replace/upgrade - please check my thinking

[DutchNeighbor]

Thank you for looking at this question. For me to upg to Win11, I must add storage to my

HP - 15t Laptop PC Product number: 5VD87AV 256 GB PCIe® NVMe™ M.2 SSD..

 - so i bought 

HP EX900 Plus 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD with 3D NAND Flash, 3300 MB/s Read and 2700 MB/s Write - not the fastest, I now realize, but I am just a home user with MS office and browsers and great apps I don't want to reload. 

- Now, from reading exc threads here, I understand that I can use a backup utility like Macrium to write a full system image to an external storage device like 'SanDisk 2TB Extreme PRO Portable SSD', allowing me to change out the internal SSD and use Macrium to restore Win 10 with apps and data intact.  At that point I could use the Win11 upgrade process offered by MS and not have to reload all my stuff.     There are so many problems I've read through about cloning drives and booting from new devices :  

Is this a good way to accomplish the goal?  I really appreciate any ideas or corrections to my thinking.

"To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts."    - Henry David Thoreau

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

The only problem I can think of with what you want to do is that when you restore the 256 GB image on the 1 TB SSD you will have 750 GB of blank space.

You would need to find a disk utility that will merge the operating system partition into the unallocated space.

I don't think you can use the built in Windows disk management utility to do that unless the unallocated space is adjacent to the operating system partition, and you know that Murphy's Law is against you on it being that convenient.

You can use Macrium reflect to clone the smaller capacity hard drive to a larger one and you should be all set.

Cloning a disk using Macrium Reflect 8

[DutchNeighbor · Accepted solution]

Thanks Paul.  Glad I asked!  My intent is to use a 2TB external drive, and with this feedback I would:

• connect new external 2TB drive and first partition into 2 1TB drives.  (256 is barely enough)
• use Macrium to clone recreate the 256 drive on the 1TB external and 'extend to fill target disk' as shown, so that the copy on external drive is allocated to a 1TB drive

That way, when I restore from external, the disks will be same size.  

 I'm also copying data files and such to another place, and i made a bootable usb for Win10 expecting chaos/murphy, but with so much Intelligence available these days, it seems one could succeed with a good plan.  Unless anyone thinks of else this will be mine.

thanks again for reading my worry and weighing in!

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

Hopefully, that will work for you.