Fastest way to transfer old HD to new SSD HD?

[delsoul]

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.

 

[MarkC426]

What are you transferring to (which Mac)..?

 

[AlixSPQR]

Which OS/OS's? Ad notam: Do not wipe the old drive until you have checked the data on the new SSD.

 

[delsoul]

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.

 

[Steve Adams]

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.

 

[conmee]

xcopy hdd:\*.* ssd:\*.* /s /e /h

😉

 

[Ben J.]

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.

 

[MarkC426]

If it is to be used with a Mac, make sure you format it correctly.

Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac

In Disk Utility on your Mac, erase and reformat a storage device to use with a Mac.

support.apple.com

 

[Mrbobb]

which is about 24 minutes.

We are spending lots of effort for 24 minutes, to a once-off task.

 

[pshufd]

We are spending lots of effort for 24 minutes, to a once-off task.

I've done this many times in the past though usually not for something like 118 GB. You get it started and it's taking forever and then you think if there's a faster way to get it off and then you ask yourself why you didn't move it to a USB3 device. But, yes, in general, you just wait. I have a few very old Western Digital MyBook hard drives that this applies to and 2009 and 2010 iMacs that have USB2. Best thing was to move them off to SSDs. It's just harder today because they are so expensive.

 

[SalisburySam]

Seriously? 118GB? Less than a half hour and we have a thread agonizing over that? I’ve got two full 8TB HDDs I’m thinking about moving to SSD and planning to just let ‘er rip over a weekend for the 28 hours or so each will take.

 

[lowendlinux]

I use dd fort this