Best way to move 400gb?

[Robert1986]

I just got my new 1TB drive and would like to transfer 400gb from my other drive to my new 1TB drive. Would it be best to move it in small parts, or all at once?

 

[jak731]

Should be safe enough to do all at once, as long as you are not hoping to shutdown in the near future.

 

[Robert1986]

Will leave PC on over night. Took 4 minutes to move 8gb just now.

 

[miniyazz]

That's quite slow. Is it an external drive through USB?

Doing it all at once is fine, just be sure to copy and delete, not move, otherwise if something unexpected happens it can be a right pain in the bum.

 

[Flukester]

i wouldn't use windows explorer to move tons of data or little files as one little error and it'll bomb out and you don't know where it got to

use xcopy from cmd prompt instead, something like 'xcopy d:\ e:\ /y /c /h' where d: is source drive and e: is dest

 

[FaceplantSi]

As Flukester said, Windows is rubbish at moving large quantities of data so use an alternate method like xcopy, or my personal favourite Robocopy, which can be run as either a cmd line from a batch file or there is even a downloadable GUI version which makes life even easier.

It's a robust copy tool so even if files fail due to security errors or corruptions etc it'll continue with the next file and so on - and it can be set to log any failures to a txt file so you can check later how it's gone.

 

[Robert1986]

I moved the 400gb in around 2 hours. All the files copied over just fine.

I'll check out the programs you guys suggested for future use.