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delsoul

macrumors 65816
Original poster
I looked and couldn’t find where to put this question, this seemed like the best place

I have an old platter style hard drive from an old laptop and I want to transfer the data off of it to a new SSD for backup and modernity. What’s the fastest way to transfer? I’m guessing I’m limited by the speeds of the old HD but I’d like to check and see if anyone had better ideas. It’s an about 115gb of data to transfer.
 
The source computer with the slow hard drive, It’s running Ubuntu 12.4! I’m looking into cloud methods right now to see if it’ll help. It’s old speed hard hard drive and only usb-a 2.0.
 
The source computer with the slow hard drive, It’s running Ubuntu 12.4! I’m looking into cloud methods right now to see if it’ll help. It’s old speed hard hard drive and only usb-a 2.0.
You will be bottlenecked by the source drive. They only go so fast. So do the transfer when you have enough time to commit to it. After that is done, it will be much faster with the SSD.
 
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I’m guessing I’m limited by the speeds of the old HD but I’d like to check and see if anyone had better ideas. It’s an about 115gb of data to transfer.
Yes, the old HDD will be the bottleneck in terms of data read speed. No way around that.

A rough estimate would be;
7200rpm HDD ~80MB/s.
115000MB divided by 80 equals 1437.5 seconds, which is about 24 minutes.
 
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