Using dd to clone a HDD to an SSD?

Yes, the idea is right, but the command is bad. If there is even one read error, the dd command will skip a byte which will cause the partitioning scheme to be faulty. You need to specify that every byte is copied to the same physical location (from the start).

dd if=/dev/oldsataspinningdisk of=/dev/newssd bs=64K conv=noerror,sync

Just to add up to the (perfectly fine) existing answers:

Why do you need a blocksize bs=64? While I cannot tell whether it is the fastest setting at all, the simple answer is, that it runs way faster (around 4x) than the standard settings... at least on my system. Tim Williscroft states that 100M could be faster, more research could be needed was done here, have a look.

Test data here: (I cancelled the first run because it took too long imho.)

$ sudo dd if=/dev/sdb4 of=/dev/sda2 status=progress
12962501120 bytes (13 GB, 12 GiB) copied, 394 s, 32,9 MB/s
$ sudo dd if=/dev/sdb4 of=/dev/sda2 status=progress bs=64K 
13143113728 bytes (13 GB, 12 GiB) copied, 98,0026 s, 134 MB/s 

status=progress is useful to monitor what happens, alternatives to that see this "Unix&Linux" post. I'd recommend (refined by Kamil Maciorowski) adding conv=noerror,sync iflag=fullblock for error safety - iflag isn't POSIX required, but mentioned in the docs and needed when you use the wrong bs/ibs.

Also by Tim Williscroft: You could add the convention conv=notrunc.

What you could also look into is a trick by Mistiry that

Nobody seems to know [...] dd is an asymmetrical copying program, meaning it will read first, then write, then back. You can pipe dd to itself and force it to perform the copy symmetrically, like this: dd if=/dev/sda | dd of=/dev/sdb. In my tests, running the command without the pipe gave me a throughput of ~112kb/s. With the pipe, I got ~235kb/s. I've never experienced any issues with this method. Good luck!

While he seems to misuse the the word symmetric in sense of meaning, this would probably also be worth a try.

Comment by groxxda: "If you do this and specify a blocksize, make sure you use the same blocksize on each invocation." (The respective post is also worth reading)

I did it recently using plain vanilla:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

Booted my laptop with ubuntu mate live usb.

For 1TB hdd it took ~6 hours @43mb/s, fired up my laptop with new SSD and everything (all windows and linux partitions) worked flawlessly.