I cloned my 1 TB SSD to an external HDD with a bootable USB win pe. It was successful but it took 16 hours overnight
i only have usb 2 on my pc so maybe that is why it was only 13MB per second?
I have a PCI Express x1. Could i use Amazon.com or similar
Maybe it would be better to put that twenty bucks towards a newer machine.
you havent filled in your specs so we dont know what you are using.
Yeah, a PCIe card like that would work alright. Keep in mind there are now different flavors of USB 3.x. and to make things harder to understand, different generations. USB 3.0 - Wikipedia List of interface bit rates - Wikipedia
Of course you can only go as fast as your USB connected hard drive allows. The HDD its self and its USB interface type.
This is an old reddit post on PCIe card chipsets you might want to consider. I have a Vantec USB to SATA adapter and it's worked quite well.
Which PCI-E USB 3.0 cards/chipsets actually work? : WindowsMR
USB is going to be very slow, and it's why I don't use that method. I temporally connect my hard drive for the clone in the computer via SATA and clone to it that way. When I used USB in the past it took a very long time to clone. And sometimes with USB in the way it is, you might get an abrupt error nullify all those hours of cloning.
My main internal drive is SSD, but I clone to an enterprise grade Hitachi platter. This specific model: HUA723020ALA640 I have four of those. The one in my computer as my scratch and downloads drive has over 24,000 hours of use (that's approximately 2 years, 8 months of continuous use) and still going strong. I'm sure others out there who have these in a RAID configuration may have more hours than that.
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