Many of the questions I receive at RicksDailyTips deal with replacing hard drives and SSDs.
After all, drives go bad and they have to be replaced, and folks are always wanting to upgrade their drives to something larger and faster.
I guess that’s why one of my most frequently asked questions is “How do I clone a hard drive (or SSD)?”
Well, today I’m going to answer that question by briefly describing two drive cloning methods that I’ve written about in the past.
Those two methods range from “inexpensive, and slightly complicated” to “just slightly more expensive, but dead-simple“:
1 – The first method I’ll discuss is “inexpensive, and slightly complicated”.
Basically, all you do is temporarily connect the new (empty) drive to an unused SATA or IDE connector in your desktop PC or to a USB port with a SATA/IDE to USB adapter, then use a free program called Clonezilla to clone the contents of the old drive onto the new one.
As mentioned above, this method very inexpensive but the software isn’t exactly intuitive. This post explains the procedure in more detail.
2 – The second method of cloning a drive costs a little more but it is literally as easy as plugging the source and destination drives into a specialized docking station and pushing a “Copy” button.
Cloning the contents of one drive onto another drive just doesn’t get any easier than this! Read this post for all the details.
Bottom line: You have two great options for cloning the contents of a hard drive or SSD onto a new drive, and they are both quite affordable. Which one you choose is entirely up to you.