Cloning OS from 120gb drive to a new, larger drive on laptop. Advice needed.

[Erik Cacciatore]

Toshiba Satellite A505-S6960
Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (was originally Vista), Service Pack 1
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T6500 @ 2.10GHz
4 GB RAM

The original HDD on my laptop recently went kaput. I had a working 120gb HDD from an HP laptop that had video/motherboard issues, so I put the 120gb HDD in the Toshiba, reinstalled Windows 7, and everything seems to be fine.
However, this new drive is just too small, so I'd like to buy a new, larger HDD, 750gb or 1tb, and clone EVERYTHING to it. OS, files, apps, settings, etc.
I was looking at a device from DriveWire that will allow me to connect the new HDD and do all the cloning, then just swap the drives.

I'm new to this level of tinkering (was the first time I'd ever swapped out a HDD) and want to be sure I'm not making any mistakes...

1. Is it OK to clone to a larger sized HDD?
2. If I were to buy a new HDD that is a hybrid, would that be an issue? The hybrid drives I've looked at only have 8gb of SSD storage, plus a regular 750gb to 1tb or storage, and my Windows folder is 12gb--so I'm guessing I wouldn't actually be able to put the OS on the SSD drive.
3. If I were to use a device like the ones offered at http://drivesolutions.com/cgi/shop/bstore.cgi?command=features&kind=kit&pos=0&type=Kits would I be able to pick and choose which elements are to be cloned to which drive? IE, could I choose to clone specific apps (apps which generally open and/or run slowly) to the SSD section, and then clone the OS and files, etc to the regular HDD? I'm guessing not. Therefore, should I skip going with a hybrid drive?
4. Does anyone have any experience using those aforementioned devices? Should I buy one of them, or are there other, better suggestions?

Since I lost all of my data on the old HDD, my idea here is to get everything setup fresh on this 120gb drive (that didn't cost me any money), allowing for the errors I will inevitably make, then once everything seems to be working as I want, only then clone it to a new HDD, so that the new HDD won't be cluttered and encumbered by unnecessary apps, bad registry items, weird codecs, conflicts, etc.

Thanks for your help.

 

[maxwellmelon]

1. yes its ok to clone to a larger drive
2. not that I would know of there suppose to act just like a normal drive just a bit faster
3. most likely not because of most cloneing software wont let you do this even for a regular drive and the second is that hybrid drives don't let you chose which data is put into the ssd section (they just automatically decide based off of how much its called for and size)
4. no I haven't actually owned one of the drives

for what you want to do it I would suggest that it would be just better to install new drive, do clean install of windows to it, the use a usb drive caddy like your looking at to move over personal files(you can find them without the cloning software and in the end you can continue to use the drive as a external hard drive to do them all important backups too) and do clean installs of only the programs you want on it after you weeded though what you want

**update actually that software does support copying of individual files according to the site but even if you copy over programs they prob wont work right due to it wont copy over the registry entrys