I had used it quite happily on a couple of USB external drives but a problem came when I got a NAS drive because Windows Image Backup requires a network disk to be NTFS formatted (it is) and also to have the disk sectors aligned on 4K boundaries (they aren't). I got around this by creating an NTFS 128 GB .vhd on the NAS and mounting it as a drive letter when I wanted to make a backup. Thus I had a vhd on a vhd.
Good to know the work around for Windows 7 with sectors aligned to 4k boundaries. I have a Buffalo brand NAS, but its not NTFS its XFS so i cant use this at the get go, but if I ever use freenas etc to make one out of an old box, that is NTFS its good to know of this 128GB .vhd file mount work around. However use on an external USB NTFS formatted drive is probably the path I would take.
Also cool that you got Acronis True Image ( Limited version ) with your OCZ SSD. I bought 4 OCZ drives and they didnt come with any bundleware
In the past, I found a way to use Seagates clone utility to clone drives that weren't Seagate. This was with a system with 3 hard drives in it. Normally 2 drives in this system, the 3rd was added to take the image and to be removed when the clone process was complete. The seagate clone software that came with the drive had to detect a valid Seagate drive to function, but then you could essentially use it then to select the 2 other drives which were not seagate such as a Western Digital drive to clone to a Maxtor ( before maxtor was bought out by seagate ).
I suppose they never thought anyone would use it to add a 3rd drive and clone 2 off brands. But as long as the software was satisfied with the single Seagate present, because it allowed for you to specify the Source and Destination drive, it allowed for this clone to happen between 2 drives that weren't seagate..LOL
This was quite a few years ago.
I tried to use DD a few times and didnt have good luck with it. It seemed to clone the drives but when attempting to boot off of the cloned drive it wouldnt boot and acted like the OS was missing. Also tried Clonezilla and also ran into problems with that which were similar to DD. *Also the drives cloned remained with the original hardware, so this was not an illegal attempt to take a single copy of Windows 7 and put it on 2 different boxes. I don't do illegal stuff like that. I buy licenses if I need extras. So given that the hardware didnt change it should work
I was able to dock the drive that was freshly cloned in my SATA/USB external dock and navigate through the drive as an external USB drive and see all the contents there, although I did not perform a check on size of data on the original and the clone, so that is where I would expect to find differences between them. Was thinking that maybe the MBR needed to be tweaked to make the drive bootable etc, but any software that doesnt work and should, if i have to fight with it, its not worth my time usually.
Was thinking it may have been because I was trying to clone between 2 different sized drives and while there was plenty of space to clone a 80GB source drive to a 160GB destination drive, these may need to be used among exact matching capacity drives etc. One thing I liked with Ghost 2003 was that the image could be taken off of a 160GB drive that was say 5GB in size of a clean install and you could place that onto a 13GB drive and it would work flawlessly, as well as place a 13GB drives 5GB image onto a 160GB drive with no problems. This also worked when direct cloning since I guess Ghost doesnt look at the empty space on the drive, and other clone hardware and software out there seem to want to perform a bit for bit copy vs only bits that actually contain data which ghost appears to do.
Here is the Windows DD software I used:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/windd/Clonezilla was just burned from ISO to disc. Don't recall the version of it, but it was a few years ago.