Transfering from one external hard drive to another???

[laatsch55]

I have a 2TB SSD that Darecy sent me and I want to copy to the one I bought for Perry. The drag and drop is not working. What do I do here folks??

 

[pennysdad]

Are you trying to drop the whole drive onto the new one, or do you have that drive open and then dropping all of the files into the new drive?

 

[laatsch55]

Trying to copy everything from one to the other...

 

[pennysdad]

Can you clone it maybe?
https://windowsradar.com/best-free-disk-cloning-software/

 

[laatsch55]

How about just a simple backup of the original drive to the new one?

 

[pennysdad]

If you can do that, try it.
You're in a PC world and I'm on a Mac.
I was just thinking of 'generic' solutions.

 

[laatsch55]

Hookay...

 

[pennysdad]

With Mac drives, if the drive belongs to someone else, then we need to access the drive as either admin or user or guest. Only admins and users have permission to write to that drive.
Don't know if the same applies to PC

 

[laatsch55]

When I try to drag and drop I get only a link from one to the other, no data transfer..

 

[pennysdad]

Try this with one file.
Press the alt key when trying to drag the file across.

 

[laatsch55]

I hilighted one file to copy to the new drive that consisted of all the flac cd's Darcy loaded. It is a 1TB file and is copying now.....says it is going to take 21 hours...

 

[pennysdad]

It may settle down to around 1GB/minute. So 10-12 hours.
I just finished doing a 3TB DD [not SSD] and it took around 30 hours I think,
SSD should be a lot faster.

 

[laatsch55]

I don't think I have the USB 3 port in use...it's a Windows 7 machine...

Ok, I thought 21 hours was a mite long, guess not..

 

[pennysdad]

Good luck.
Off to bed...

 

[laatsch55]

Night George!! Thanks..

 

[MarkWComer]

For a Windows box I usually crack it open, connect the donor and recipient drives directly to the SATA ports for faster transfer. If you have eSATA ports on the back, all the better because there’s a direct motherboard connection, but your external drive enclosure will also need to have those connections.

For Macs that don’t offer internal access, you’ll be stuck with whichever external attachment scheme it offers (USB, IEEE1394, “Lightning,” etc.). What a pity- SCSI was so convenient (but turtle slow by today’s standards).

Regardless of platform, you will run into DRM, ownership, and permission issues, if not all three at once. Don’t be scared at 21 hour copy times! Yes, it will take a while, but in my experience 21 distilled down to 8 a lot of times.

 

[FredR]

Back in the day I used Ghost:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_(disk_utility)
Ghost was everywhere back then. To the point that you would "ghost" a drive rather than copy it.

These days I use True Image (not free):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronis_True_Image

I second Mark's comment to use SATA. USB falls way short on bandwidth.

 

[laatsch55]

The cables I have are USB...

 

[BlazeES]

USB 2 will transfer (copy write) at speeds roughly between 20 and 40 megabytes a second, max. Split the difference and figure 30MB/sec or 180MB/minute or 20GB/hour. A terabyte is 1000 gigabytes. So it's going to take while if you do the math. But it's not a consistently, linear thing because once you start the process, the speed WILL vary. One of the things that slows down file copy transfers is the shear number files, so there's a butt-load of overhead that gets factored in when processing that many individual files. Add to it anything else the OS and apps do in the background from time to time, not to mention anti-virus programs and such. One last impact: If you sit and write to an SSD constantly, it's going to get hot and it's internal controller is going to throttle the speed down to protect shit. This explains much of what you see when you watch the transfer progress status and see the speed go up to it's peak and then drop to nearly zero and look stuck/frozen ... on the fly.

External SSD's are fast but if you're doing it over USB 2.0 connections, it might as well be a broke-dick-dog, spinning hard drive from 20 years ago.

You also can't trust the time estimates thrown up by Windows. That's not just fuzzy math, it's down-right sloppy as ^%$#.

 

[BlazeES]

You should have just picked up a WD Passport with a traditional, spinning hard drive in it. HDD's will allow more consistent writing to them when you're talking about bulk copying of files that add up to terabytes. It will still take a long time with your rig, but it will be done markedly quicker ... USB 2.0 being the biggest gating factor.

Imaging or cloning the drive is a good suggestion, already proposed. Means you have to crack open your rig and assumes that you have a spare SATA connection, extra power connections and the corresponding cables. Depending on the actual age of the machine, you can expect the copying or cloning processes to be 2 to 5 times faster. But then you have to be able to make sure Perry is equipped to deal with a raw drive on his side...