Advice on cloning boot drive please.

Jimbo

Jimbo

Jimbo

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I've got a WD_BLACK SN850X 2TB SSD, M.2 drive coming from elsewhere tomorrow, well it was a warehouse deal described as mint. So hoping it works out and thought I'd take a punt at £113. However I need to clone and remove my old 1TB WD Blue drive which is nearly full using Windows 11 and games and apps. I have a caddy that I used to clone my Steam deck drive it's usb C. Can I use that as it would be handy not have g to install the drive to my motherboard until it's cloned. Any decent free software I can use that's not too hard? Thank you.
 
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So I've took a chance and bagged a 4TB WD SN850X on the ***elsewhere***. Couldn't resist at £215. There's a 30 day return policy so should be fine. Described as slightly damaged packaging. Both the 2TB and the 4TB come with heatsink so that's cool. I'll install and test the 2TB today hopefully so fingers crossed. :)
:)
 
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I know this sounds mental but i wasnt even aware i was using a Gen 3 1TB WD Blue drive as my main OS. Only when I ran Crystalmark it was getting read speeds of 2458.86 MB/s rated up to 2,400 MB/s. Then i tested my gen 4 WD 500GB SN580 was getting 4040.20 MB/s rated up to 4000 MB/s. Did i click so the WD Black SN850X at 7300 MB/s should be absolutley awesome. :D
 
The comment about Acronis True Image is a good one, but this is a paid commercial program. I've also had it fail to clone and restore a PC once in the past, but only once. Clonezilla, which is free, worked perfectly - but it was a newer version.

Macrium Reflect is / was also free but it's hard to find an old version I think now as it's paid for.

The drive provider versions are good too, Samsung Disk Magic or whatever it is and the WD ones are good, used these at work before and they work well. They don't 1:1 the drive and usually skip temp or "not needed" files, but maybe they're better now.

Clonezilla is my go to now as it's free and works brilliantly. The only issue is it doesn't do larger to smaller drives from what I can see.

Edit: Clonezilla also doesn't seem to like drives with bad sectors, or I've missed a setting that says to skip them.
 
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Nemiyen said:
The comment about Acronis True Image is a good one, but this is a paid commercial program. I've also had it fail to clone and restore a PC once in the past, but only once. Clonezilla, which is free, worked perfectly - but it was a newer version.

Macrium Reflect is / was also free but it's hard to find an old version I think now as it's paid for.

The drive provider versions are good too, Samsung Disk Magic or whatever it is and the WD ones are good, used these at work before and they work well. They don't 1:1 the drive and usually skip temp or "not needed" files, but maybe they're better now.

Clonezilla is my go to now as it's free and works brilliantly. The only issue is it doesn't do larger to smaller drives from what I can see.

Edit: Clonezilla also doesn't seem to like drives with bad sectors, or I've missed a setting that says to skip them.
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It's free from WD. However, the free version only works with a WD drive as a target.
 
Thanks all for the help and sugestions, I ended up using DiskGenius and it was a breeze. For whatever reason when i cloned the old C: it partitioned the SN850X but i used it again to merge them and all is good now. Its lovely and fast the drive no errors and ive got a bagain so looking forward to reciving the 4TB next.
 
Veeam Agent is also good and free. I have it backing up my system once a week on a Monday at 9:30 am. If the machines not on it does it at the earliest opportunity. You can create recovery media to restore from a backup.
 
aaronyuri said:
I bought this same drive from OC in May 2023 for £118... Am I missing something about how £113 is a bargain now?
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It was certainly more expensive on ocuk when I last checked but granted it is going for £119 now in b-stock. Point is I was testing the other place I bought it from and I received it brand new still sealed in box with a slightly damaged box and I'm delighted with it. Thanks for peeing on my parade though. ;)

I'm now going to buy 2x 4TB WD Black SN850X with heatsink using the same method and hopefully it'll work out. I've just bagged one for £215

Having checked the tracking it says arriving Friday to be delivered by Royal mail (last one was the supplier themselves) it's left Barajas Madrid! ES. Seems a bit odd?
 
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Got my 4TB SN850X I thought I'd been scammed as it won't fit in the Qlatch of the Asus B650 E-E. It's got a bigger heatsink than the 2TB version. It's genuine enough confirmed with WD/SanDisk and Crystal mark info. The only removable Qlatch slot on the B650 E-E where I can put a normal m.2 spacer to fit it, shares lanes with the GPU. So I'm guessing my 4090 will run at 8X not 16. Don't know how much performance I'll lose but it'll have to do until I get a new motherboard. And also after formatting the drive is 3.63TB not 4TB. I expected to lose a bit but that seems a bit much.
 
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Drives are sold in bits and Windows measures in bytes so you lose a bit just on that conversion factor. After all is said and done, the "loss" is usually around 100 GB per TB. 400 give or take on 4 TB seems normal.
 
aaronyuri said:
Drives are sold in bits and Windows measures in bytes so you lose a bit just on that conversion factor. After all is said and done, the "loss" is usually around 100 GB per TB. 400 give or take on 4 TB seems normal.
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Err, no. A megabyte according to the drive manufacturers is 1,000,000 bytes but, according to everyone else, it's 1,048,576 bytes (1024 x 1024). If you divide 4,000,000,000,000 by 1,048,576 twice you get 3.63.
 
Snapshot said:
Err, no. A megabyte according to the drive manufacturers is 1,000,000 bytes but, according to everyone else, it's 1,048,576 bytes (1024 x 1024). If you divide 4,000,000,000,000 by 1,048,576 twice you get 3.63.
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GB is to 1000. GiB is 1024. Got my terminology all crossed up there. Oh well. One of those days.

Thanks for using a calculator when I couldn't be arsed.
 
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