Cloning to new HDD

A new HDD is imminent (imminent = ordered) and I wish to clone my current system partition/drive over to it. What are peoples experiences with related software that can do this, and, preferably free!

Here is my vote.

Backup your Hard Drive with Acronis

Trust me to be buying Samsung!!

2 programs (free) have worked very well for me.

Partition Wizard Home

and

http://www.todo-backup.com/products/home/

With MiniTool PWH you can easily clone from a boot cd.
I use Easeus Todo for all my back-up needs including cloning.

I suppose the main reason for posting this request is that things "move on". Just checking that what I have previously thought of as good was "still up there".

Samsung hard drives ROCK! The best spinners out there for sure!

No wonder Seagate bought them out, so Seagate could appropriate Samsung's hard drive technology into their own crappy drives.

Second that, an absolute pleasure to work with Acronis

Thanks for everybody's views. At the end of the day I decided to leave the system on the "older" drive. I used the partition that was my docs for all my software installers/ yet to tries and the maybe never tries. I stuck all my personal stuff on the new drive along with a partition for my Macrium backups.
Photoshop now has the oldest 60gb Maxtor drive as its scratch disc!
This will be my 3rd Samsung drive, plus others that I recommended. Lovely discs especially after my old creakers, silent as a silent thing.

Only issue I've had, which some of you may recall, was my first one ended up with pretty dubious SMART readings, that was all down to the crappy SATA cable that came with the PC and kept working loose. Only so much Blu-Tack you can use before you relent and buy a new cable!! Once I'd swapped that out, not had a problem since.

Easeus Todo has a clone function, I only used Clone once it was with Acronis it worked quite well. My Backup programs are the native one on W7, Macrium Reflect and Easeus Todo. Yes I use all thee to separate hard drives. I like redundancy in the matter of backups

I'm a big fan of Samsung drives, I've got 2 running in my NAS and one in my main machine (alongside an old Maxtor).

AFAIK, you can use the free version of Acronis as long as you have any one of the qualifying drives in your system. That said, I've got the home 2010 edition so I can't confirm this for you. It's a great bit of software .