Nicholash2,
The choice depends on how much accumulated cruft is on your machine. In most cases, I just CCC clone the old drive to the new drive, either before or after physical installation, and continue with life. In my experience, PDM is perfectly happy running from a cloned replacement volume. In effect, cloning physically move the bits, but does not logically move the applications or data. The volume contents and structure are the same except, possibly, free space. Don't forget to have CCC create the recovery volume as well.
This works for PDM in particular because PDM does not care about the volume UUID, in contrast to some other applications which must be re-installed or re-authorized on a cloned volume.
Make certain to keep the old drive as a pre-upgrade backup until you have verified that all your applications continue to work. Do not overwrite this backup until you have run the new drive long enough to be satisfied it will not fail early.