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Based on strong gerbil feedback in these forums, I gave Macrium a try.

I cloned a 1TB HDD to a 256 GB SSD. First I used Auslogics to defrag the HDD. (The unmovable areas were the only issue - OS and programs were about 100GB).

Auslogics Defrag trial proved excellent - though I am unsure if a defrag program is really needed these days. It did the trick over a couple of reboots. Then used Win 8.1 to shrink to near 256GB partitions size - but it ended up about 270GB.

Macrium did the rest of the shrinking - the shrink to fit feature was great. Not only was the SSD a fine clone - it was extremely well defraged - well beyond what Auslogics had done.

I am happy, purchased Macrium.

Well, the SSD doesn't care if it is defragged or not, and seriously, for a Windows boot drive, it won't stay that way long anyway.

But yes, Macrium has been very reliable here, and even helped me upgrade my Asus laptop from 500 GB to two 1TB drives. The bare bones prep from a backup image worked flawlessly, and the only time I have trouble with my scheduled backups is when the destination drive is full or if I forgot to plug it in...d'oh!

Macrium is highly recommended here. So well done that I left Acronis True Image by the side of the road, wilting in the hot sun. Although I still use Acronis Disk Director whenever partitions need to be mangled with.

I've been using EaseUS ToDo Backup for my "clone to SSD" needs:

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

So far it's been pretty good. I clone new workstations to SSD and leave the mechanical in the case as a backup in case of SSD failure. I've also used it on some Win2K3 servers I needed to move to larger drives. I'm using the Advanced Server edition.

Seek time for SSDs should be constant regardless of location (it is just addressing memory), as there is no head and arm to move. So by defragging an SSD you just used up some writes (for an SSD it is finite) unnecessarily. I hope you did not end up with too many megabytes to move or you may be looking at the "bytes written" counter and wondering why the SSD's lifetime has been cut short.

Or, if the defrag program is aware of SSD it will do minimal (if nothing) data moves.

Dear Fox - indeed SSD writes are finite but the TR tests do suggest they are pretty numerous too! This disk is low use overall.

Anyway - I did the defrags on the HDD to get it as small as possible - as close to the 256 SSD before the clone job. I did analyze it using Auslogics once the clone to SSD was done - but no defrag.

Defragging the SSD did seem pointless. Still, I don't think I've quite killed it yet! The SSD massively beats the HDD on boot times on a massively networked system.

Thanks Macrium! And TR forums for pointing me to it (after recent awful experience with 2013 Acronis products and support I needed a new lead).