Swapping Hard Drives But Keeping Data

allosunshine · 16 Apr 2008 at 10:39

The 500GB HDD in my new system is a bit loud so am thinking of swapping it for my old WD5000AAKS.
Would it be better to setup a Raid 1 to copy the data and then removing the old drive or just clone it??
If I go down the Raid route would it also copy all tthe partitions??
Thanks.

rpstewart · 16 Apr 2008 at 10:47

Moving from a single drive to RAID1 and back is not the best way of doing this, depending on your setup chances are it's not even technically possible without a reinstall.

The proper way to do this is using Acronis True Image or the like to clone one disk onto the other.

funkeh · 16 Apr 2008 at 10:49

This should do it, brill proggy and free!
http://www.xxclone.com/

allosunshine · 16 Apr 2008 at 10:59

funkeh said:
This should do it, brill proggy and free!
http://www.xxclone.com/

Thanks for the quick replies.

Will this copy all partitions as well??
I have Paragon Partition Manager 9, has anyone used this??

funkeh · 16 Apr 2008 at 11:03

Yes iirc.

AbsenceJam · 16 Apr 2008 at 11:31

No you should clone it... I can recommend True Image for this.

allosunshine · 16 Apr 2008 at 11:59

Looks like I'll be cloning then. I'll give this PAragon software a go and see how I get on with it before I go buying Acronis. Thanks.

A2Z · 16 Apr 2008 at 13:11

sorry to jump on the thread - but with True Image, does that allow you to basically just copy all the contents of 1 Hard Drive straight to another? What is the difference between doing this and just copy + pasting it all?

I need to copy everything from a 320gb HD onto a 500gb, so would this be the best way? ive always just copy + pasted before...

rpstewart · 16 Apr 2008 at 13:19

Copying and pasting won't copy everything - hidden files will be missed, files which are in use and locked won't be copied etc.

A2Z · 16 Apr 2008 at 13:23

true..but i guess im only moving multimedia files, so it should all be ok..ill give true image a try though looks interesting..

also why are transfer speeds so low when transferring from 1 HD to another? Ive always wondered this...why cant they actually make them able to do 300mb/s or at least 150mb/s?

rpstewart · 16 Apr 2008 at 13:32

A2Z said:
true..but i guess im only moving multimedia files, so it should all be ok..ill give true image a try though looks interesting..

For a non windows drive then yeah, copying and pasting is as good as any although there are better options (synctoy, robocopy etc) which are more robust, if a C&P fails you have no easy way of either starting where you left off or working out how far it got.

A2Z said:
also why are transfer speeds so low when transferring from 1 HD to another? Ive always wondered this...why cant they actually make them able to do 300mb/s or at least 150mb/s?

The speed of a copy operation will be determined by a number of factors. Firstly the read speed of the source drive and the write speed of the target drive. Even the best of the current SATA drives can only sustain read and write speeds of a little over 100MB/s so that's going to limit things for a start and in most cases the source drive will be much slower than that.

The mix of files being copied also has a bearing, small files mean lots of writes to the MFT as well as the data so the heads have to keep shifting about which slows the average speed.

A2Z · 16 Apr 2008 at 13:44

thanks

1 last thing, just to confirm, true image therefore allows you to copy a windows drive to another HD, by use of a boot disk im assuming...so you can basically just boot from your normal windows installation on another HD, saving you the need to re install windows on the other HD?

rpstewart · 16 Apr 2008 at 13:49

Yup, the boot disk is more of a backup restoration method though. For a simple clone to a new drive it's done drive to drive in that sort of pre-windows part of the boot process.