Looking for good software to transfare HDD Data

[Hulkstern]

So I am trying to transfer the data from my old 1tb WD Blue to my new 4tb Seagate Barracuda (keep in mind, not OS disk). I usually use Minitool partition wizard free edition but the free version only supports MBR but in order to get one 3.7 tb volume I need GPT format type, I would normally just go into windows explorer and ctrl-C and ctrl-V to transfer the files but I am getting some abysmal speeds considering they are connected via SATA Directly to another computers MoBo (10-30 MB/s). Does anybody have a recommendation for some software that would work for this?

[Syntaxvgm]

The speeds on copy-paste are bad because individual small files are hard for mechanical hard drives, it's seeking all over the drive. What you need is to copy the raw data front to back. I recommend HDD raw copy tool. 

http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-Raw-Copy-Tool/

It's not the fastest one out there, but the speed will be consistent and be easy to estimate how long you have. 1TB wont take too long. 

 

Now keep in mind if disk one is MBR than you wont be able to expand the partition to the full size of the second disk. You could try gptgen

https://sourceforge.net/projects/gptgen/

Just do it after a raw copy to the new disk then exapnd, as you don't want to do this to your only copy. It can fuck something up. 

 

Another tool I'd like to introduce you to is disk to vhd

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd

This will raw copy and entire disk into a vhd or vhdx file, which you can mount like a disk but move around like a file. This is great for making backups, especially for OS drives as you can boot them in a VM (can be tricky to get it to boot properly), not useful to you right now  but worth mentioning. 

[Hulkstern]

6 minutes ago, Syntaxvgm said:

The speeds on copy-paste are bad because individual small files are hard for mechanical hard drives, it's seeking all over the drive. What you need is to copy the raw data front to back. I recommend HDD raw copy tool. 

http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-Raw-Copy-Tool/

 

Now keep in mind if disk one is MBR than you wont be able to expand the partition to the full size of the second disk. You could try gptgen

https://sourceforge.net/projects/gptgen/

Just do it after a raw copy to the new disk then exapnd, as you don't want to do this to your only copy. It can fuck something up. 

 

Another tool I'd like to introduce you to is disk to vhd

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd

This will raw copy and entire disk into a vhd or vhdx file, which you can mount like a disk but move around like a file. This is great for making backups, especially for OS drives as you can boot them in a VM (can be tricky to get it to boot properly), not useful to you right now  but worth mentioning. 

thank you so much, I imagine the raw data transfer will go rather quickly since I imagine it would act in terms of transfer rates like it was a large file, though do you know how slow/fast is the gptgen tool is? I have a couple of drives I need to probably do this treatment to.

[Syntaxvgm]

5 minutes ago, Diecreepers56 said:

thank you so much, I imagine the raw data transfer will go rather quickly since I imagine it would act in terms of transfer rates like it was a large file, though do you know how slow/fast is the gptgen tool is? I have a couple of drives I need to probably do this treatment to.

pretty fast I think. 

HDD raw copy tool isn't the fastest for some reason, but my favorite. It will likely be between 30-50MB/s, but it will be consistent and shouldn't take too long. Easy to estimate time remaining. It has some funny business going on when copying to different sized drives where itll think the larger drive is 100%, so it's best to hand calc and come back later and see where it stopped. (read the log not the bar)

Also I'm pretty sure hddrawcopy tool is the one I use to copy large to small, which works if you reduce the larger dis's partition size to be smaller than the destination disk, then make sure it's at the front of the disc. (usually is). Great for HDD> SSD with some tricks to temporarily reduce the size. 

[Hulkstern]

7 hours ago, Syntaxvgm said:

pretty fast I think. 

HDD raw copy tool isn't the fastest for some reason, but my favorite. It will likely be between 30-50MB/s, but it will be consistent and shouldn't take too long. Easy to estimate time remaining. It has some funny business going on when copying to different sized drives where itll think the larger drive is 100%, so it's best to hand calc and come back later and see where it stopped. (read the log not the bar)

Also I'm pretty sure hddrawcopy tool is the one I use to copy large to small, which works if you reduce the larger dis's partition size to be smaller than the destination disk, then make sure it's at the front of the disc. (usually is). Great for HDD> SSD with some tricks to temporarily reduce the size. 

So I tried the raw copy and upon completion the drive in Disk management showed up as Invalid. I tried to go ahead and use gptgen which didn't work. I guess what I am wondering is, are there any ways that you know of that I could go about this or do you know where I may have gone wrong?

[Syntaxvgm]

2 hours ago, Diecreepers56 said:

So I tried the raw copy and upon completion the drive in Disk management showed up as Invalid. I tried to go ahead and use gptgen which didn't work. I guess what I am wondering is, are there any ways that you know of that I could go about this or do you know where I may have gone wrong?

so a few things could cause this. One, I should have mentioned a format for the disk you are copying to is probably good, a complete 0 not quick, but still should be fine...

does it show as an invalid dynamic disk? What's showing? I'm not sure this is what the problem would look like in disk management, but when you directly copy a disk sometimes disk management doesn't want to bring both online at the same time, so try connecting it on its own. 

If that's not the issue, use a program I love called Testdisk to change it to a basic disk. Here's a tutorial I just found

https://mypkb.wordpress.com/2007/03/28/how-to-non-destructively-convert-dynamic-disks-to-basic-disks/

 

test disk is great to have as well. You can restore file tables and recover files from drives that were formatted by quick format (just erases file table data) or partially bad disks. 

[Hulkstern]

19 hours ago, Syntaxvgm said:

so a few things could cause this. One, I should have mentioned a format for the disk you are copying to is probably good, a complete 0 not quick, but still should be fine...

does it show as an invalid dynamic disk? What's showing? I'm not sure this is what the problem would look like in disk management, but when you directly copy a disk sometimes disk management doesn't want to bring both online at the same time, so try connecting it on its own. 

If that's not the issue, use a program I love called Testdisk to change it to a basic disk. Here's a tutorial I just found

https://mypkb.wordpress.com/2007/03/28/how-to-non-destructively-convert-dynamic-disks-to-basic-disks/

 

test disk is great to have as well. You can restore file tables and recover files from drives that were formatted by quick format (just erases file table data) or partially bad disks. 

I ended up going the route of just using teracopy on a seperate machine to copy the files over, I also got a new SSD for christmas along with that HDD and when I tried to move my OS install to the new SSD I ended up breaking the install on the old SSD and the new one, so I had to reinstall and since I had mostly program files and games on that HDD I think the steam library will be the only thing I can still use. All that considered though, thank you for your help.