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How to clone a Hard Drive or SSD

2014-11-05
hey what's going on all you PC addicts J's two cents here and I get a lot of product that comes through this room and while ago I actually was given a Samsung 840 Evo to put into skunkworks this wasn't actually sent to me for an official review but I have been mentioning that the 256 gigabyte SSD on skunkworks is filling up pretty fast and the 128 gigabyte SSD that's currently installed in my test rig has less than eight gigabytes free on it pretty damn atrocious when it comes to hard drive situation in this room now I've been putting off actually doing the transfer of data on to the new Samsung Drive because I'm so busy making content for you guys and then it dawned on me why don't I just do review showing you guys how to migrate all of your data why don't I think of this sooner EVGA ACX 2.0 cooler with its three phase six slot motor 11 Swift fan blades and double ball bearing design offers reduced power noise and thermals for the optimum gaming experience click the link in the description to learn more now this is actually a topic that has been requested quite a bit and I never thought about doing it because sometimes I forget things that seem so basic to me especially since I work in IT for my day job sometimes I forget just how not common-sense it really is what I mean by that is a lot of people who've never done it wouldn't necessarily know where to start now if you do a simple google search you'll find that there's a ton of utilities out there that actually do data migration and copying and cloning up drives but I'm gonna go ahead and show you guys the way that I do it now this is the drive that came out of skunk works the main SSD was an ADATA SX 900 256 gigabyte drive and I have the exact same drive in a 128 gigabyte format in the test rig behind me now it doesn't actually matter what kind of drives you have it doesn't have to go from an SSD to an SSD it can go from a hard drive to a solid-state drive back and forth it doesn't matter all it's going to do is take the data and clone it over to the new drive now I use a program called Acronis True HD the reason why mentioning that is it actually comes bundled with the a data drives and prior to doing let a data reviews I just use some free utilities which sometimes we're great and sometimes they weren't but today's topic we're actually covering it with the Acronis True HD that comes bundled with the SSD and I'm not a sponsor of the channel or anything it just is what I have available to me so what we're going to go ahead and do is we are going to install these drives into the test rig we are going to set the a data as our source drive and we're going to set the Samsung 840 Evo as the destination so it's going to format the SSD and that's going to copy the data here and put it on to there so we have to exact copies regardless of what the capacity is it doesn't really matter what the capacity is as long as the data that you're copying fits on the drive that you're trying to put it on I couldn't take 500 gigabytes of data and put it on to the 256 I wouldn't exactly work in fact it wouldn't even let you do it it would tell you there's a capacity issue so we're going to install these into the computer we're going to boot up a Cronus and we're going to point the camera at the screen it's a little bit archaic but I can't use my capture device because it's going to actually do a custom partition on one of the drives and it's going to boot into its own little oh s where it's actually going to do the cloning so let's go ahead and get these installed and start up the utility transition okay guys so we're currently booted here into my test system and if we take a look at my computer you can see the situation is actually worse than I thought I only have six point one three gigabytes left on my 128 gigabyte Drive that's pretty bad now this is just a system recovery partition this is my original SSD that came out of skunkworks one hundred sixty two gigabytes free and this is the 500 gigabyte SSD here you can see there's a little bit of data on there but here they are everything was automatically detected and you're good to go so we're going to do is we're going to open up a Cronus true HD over here on the right there's a box here where it says clone disk there's a lot of different features built into this but we are going to do clone disk and it's going to initialize here and it's going to allow us to do automatic or manual which gives us full control we're going to do automatic here and I'm going to say that I want to take my source disk which is asking for right here source disk which is my SS s X 900 even labels them out it says Samsung SSD 840 Evo 500 gigabyte a data s X 900 119 gigabytes free after the system partition and then my a data s X 900 238 gigabytes of my 256 so this this is my source I'm telling it to copy the 238 gigabyte Drive and we're going to give it a destination disk and as you can see it grayed out our source because we can't copy it from itself to itself that would be kind of redundant we're going to copy it here over to the 840 Evo hit nest neck hit nest the dead hit next the destination hard disk drive you've chosen contains some partitions that could contain useful data click OK to confirm deletion of all partitions on the destination hard disk drive so what it's saying is it's going to wipe the drive now we want to go ahead and copy partitions without changes or copy partitions and use disk as a non system GPT cell we're going to go ahead and copy all the partitions with no changes I want a direct copy we're going to hit next target disk and source disk are correctly identified here they are and we're going to go ahead and send this thing off to the races so proceed so now when it's going to do is it's going to analyze the source and the destination this could take up to 2025 minutes to actually perform but as you can see it was just a few simple clicks so we'll go ahead and let this thing run and do its thing and then we'll come back to it and see how well it did and once again I apologize for the audio and/or the video quality here I will work on better ways to do screen captures I promise but once I got away from HDMI cables and actually got a lot harder to do screen caps my bad alright so the cloning is done we booted back into the operating system on the test bench and if we open up our File Explorer here you'll see here's our crappy try that is nearly full we've got our for our 500 gigabyte drive right here and our 256 gigabyte drive right here now this was the source here are the files you can see all the folders and stuff the windows folder is the Windows 10 folder widows old because I upgraded from seven is my fraps folder that's got some of my benchmarks and stuff in there that I've been working on and if we go ahead and take a look at the destination drive the 500 gigabyte SSD it's the exact same thing look at that all the exact same stuff in here so they are now direct clones of each other so theoretically all I have to do now let's plop the 500 gigabyte SSD into skunkworks and we're up and running so there you go a short sweet non fluffy video here from J's $0.02 just showing you quick and easy how I handle all of the different drives coming in and out of this place and moving them around between computers without having to spend tons of time reinstalling things so if you've got computers that you want to be exact copies of each other this is a really easy way to do it this is also really easy we use this in IT we use them we basically create ISOs from the existing hard drives and when we set up new computers at work we just copy the ISOs which is our main like kind of a master copy of all of our operating systems and software and stuff we just install the ISO onto the new drives which we created also from utility simple very similar to this so guys when Jace $0.02 I hope you guys have enjoyed the video I didn't do anything crazy with the editing I just wanted to give you nice raw information here and as always guys thanks for watching head on over to Twitter if you have any questions if you want to submit topics very similar to the hundreds of you that have requested this video you finally got it head on over there or Facebook to tell me what topics you guys would like to see me cover I think one of the reasons people keep asking for is Jay how do you do cable management again that's one of those things that seems really simple and straightforward and common sense to me but maybe there's some tips and tricks I can show you guys to help out when it comes to cable management so I'm gonna get out of here now I'm gonna install it in skunkworks can be up and running there's always guys hope to see you in the next
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