fastest way to transfer 2.2TB?

[rudeguy]

I'm looking at upgrading my son's gaming computer's hard drives. He currently has two 1TB storage drives and one 500G system drive. My plan is to upgrade his system drive to an SSD, no problem there since he needs a clean Windows install. My question is on the storage drives. I want to upgrade his storage drives to two 2/3TB drives. My issue is how to transfer the ~200G of crap from his system drive (game files and such) and 2TB from his old storage drives to the new drives.

His mobo only has 3 SATA ports and I don't really want to install a SATA card unless that's my only option. I have a SATA to USB 2.0 adapter but that would take a couple thousand years to complete its mission.

What's my best option here?

 

[KillerBee]

pull out one of his storage drives - swap in the new one - copy data
rinse & repeat

 

[Seven]

Do a drive at a time. Use a robocopy to transfer files.

 

[DarkRogue]

If you don't have an external enclosure or two lying around, you can try to transfer them over a network on another PC. I'd only recommend this if you have a Gigabit LAN, but even then it might be arguably slower than using SATA.

Otherwise, you'll have to do some drive shuffling with his 3 SATA ports. Disconnect one or both data drives, hook up new HDD, back up system files onto it. Then disconnect that drive, install fresh HDD plus one data drive to back up, copy files over. Then disconnect those two and repeat for the last data drive.

 

[Despoiler]

Drive to drive. Swap in hard drives to copy from as needed.

 

[blastingcap]

A single 3TB drive would enough to hold 2.2TB so you would just need to swap twice at most. Not sure why you want another one unless it is for redundancy such as RAID mirroring. GigE is fast enough that it won't be much different than drive-swapping. E.g., my NAS gets ~100MB/s sustained throughput over GigE.

 

[rudeguy]

Any idea how long it would take doing the drive swapping?

 

[fuzzymath10]

What kind of files are on the drives? Big files will be faster.

If we assume 50MB/sec, that's 20 second per GB, or about 6 hour per TB. So I would do it overnight, and USB 2.0 may not be so bad since at 35MB/sec you're looking at 9 hours anyway. That way you can have the smaller old drive over usb 2.0 and the other old drive plus the new one inside the case, and it will take at least a night and possibly up to a whole day.

 

[tweakboy]

I dont recommend 3TB drives, we have no proper support for it. It will only shows 2TB in Windows 7 ...

How much Por* and music does your son have for 2 3TB drives.. wow he must be the por* king. Also you dont need that much for games. Also I think you reassess the situation. If your going to get a SSD for him I suggest you get a 512GB instead of 2 3TB .. buy 1 3TB and a 512GB SSD. I dont think your son is going to like a 256GB SSD if he has such large drives already.

With 512GB you can have your OS all apps. all games,, I have 14 installed plus DAW and DAW projects,, I have 150GB free still. SSD will blow him away, concentrate on that instead of these 3TB drives. gl

 

[Zxian]

I dont recommend 3TB drives, we have no proper support for it. It will only shows 2TB in Windows 7 ...

False. As long as the drive is configured as a GPT disk and not MBR the OP will be able to use the full size. Support for data volumes larger than 2TB has existed since Server 2003.

 

[kleinkinstein]

Grab a $4 crossover cable and get transferring. It's quick and reliable.

 

[mikeymikec]

False. As long as the drive is configured as a GPT disk and not MBR the OP will be able to use the full size. Support for data volumes larger than 2TB has existed since Server 2003.

+1

I have done it without a lot of faffing around myself. I believe I even posted a thread/question here about it a while ago