One of my internal hard drives at home used for media has been logging some errors recently, and I confirmed with the free CrystalDiskInfo that its SMART records show it’s close to running out of reserved sectors that can be used to replace bad ones, likely meaning some physical degradation has been occurring lately. The yellow “Caution” that CrystalDiskInfo shows for the drive means the drive should be replaced ASAP before it inevitably starts getting unrecoverable errors – or possibly suffers a catastrophic failure – so I ordered a new 6TB drive to replace the crusty old 4TB, which was due for an upgrade anyway because it’s nearly full.
Last night, I started copying the old drive to the new with Microsoft’s RichCopy utility, which can do multiple copy threads at once and is therefore a lot faster than copying with Windows Explorer or with xcopy at the command line, but after eight hours it wasn’t even 10% done, so I abandoned that.
I then remembered what I didn’t remember last night, which is that the free Macrium Reflect that I use for backup can clone disks to same size or larger drives. I hadn’t tried it before, so I started it 20 minutes ago. Watching it in action, I see it actually takes the target drive offline and uses volume shadowing to make the clone. It’s writing 180+MB/second to the target drive instead of the 12-15MB/sec RichCopy was achieving and is already 5% complete, so instead of 80+ hours it will take about 8.
Postscript: I ended up having to use AOMEI Backupper to clone the drive (their free version allows you to clone non-system disks). Macrium Reflect kept reporting an unrecoverable read error 73% of the way through, but I had verified with chkdsk /r, which checks all sectors for bad blocks, that the only bad blocks were in unallocated sectors on the drive. Macrium’s “Intelligent sector copy” clone method, which I had selected, is supposed to copy only allocated sectors, but it was obviously trying to copy unallocated sectors, a hundred or so of which are bad on the old drive. Backupper was a little slower than Macrium (160MB/sec rather than 180+), but it didn’t try to read any unallocated sectors.
These are all free utilities:
CrystalDiskInfo: https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/
Macrium Reflect: https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree
AOMEI Backupper: https://www.backup-utility.com/
