Data Hoarder

Quickest -

1. Take the lid off the source PC put the HDD in it
2. Copy the stuff.
3. Pull it out
4. Put it the other PC,
5. Your done

Formatting the HDD my be optional.

1. Take the drive from PC 1 and attach to PC 2 => copy / paste

2. External drive

Parallel port would be faster than serial, but if you’re using serial I’d go with Z modem for the compression and error correction.

Connect both computers over ethernet and rsync the data across. It will still take several hours over gigabit ethernet though.

I just transferred 12tb from one hdd to another via usb 3.0. Went at roughly ~180mbps and took 1.5 days

Fastest "normal" way would be write it to a USB 3 drive on machine 1, read from drive later on machine 2. An SSD would be best. Even with having to do the write and read in two phases, I'd still expect it to be faster than a 1G network.

(Less normal ways would be things like Thundrerbolt SSDs, 10G or 40G ethernet for direct transfer, etc. But if you have that kind of tech already in place, then you're not asking. ;)

10 GbE. 17 minutes.

Of course you need disks that can read/write at that speed (1.25 GB/s). Should not be a problem for NVMe SSDs.

I have a PC in a spot of my house I can't get a cable to. But that's the PC I do my Blu Ray ripping and encoding on, so I keep a 5tb external drive for moving the files to my NAS afterwards. Sometimes it would take days over WiFi instead of minutes to hours over USB 3 twice. (and piss off my wife for saturating the wifi, heh)

USB 3.1 Gen2 is hard to beat. 10Gbps. But for HDDs the HDDs themselves will be the bottleneck. For sustained file transfers, perhaps no more than up to 3Gbps, even if installed in the same PC. Good SATA SSDs may manage closer to 6Gbps. NVMe SSDs are likely to saturate USB 3.1 Gen2. Then PCI-e directly between installed drives is the fastest. Normal cabled network is only 1Gbps.

File transfers to/from external multibay USB DAS can be done in parallel, involving multiple HDDs, and come close to saturating 10Gbps USB3.1 Gen2 speeds.

Then there is thunderbolt.

Start a rsync transfer when you go to bed. In the morning it will most likely be done.

I would write it to an nvme drive and swap that drive to the new pc

Over LAN with flavored solution of your choice.
Other than that, I use one of my spare drives and my USB docking station if I need to move it outside of my own house. I never really had a need for dedicated external drives but a docking station is handy for many things, this being one of them.

What is the best method?

Sometimes the best method isn't a transfer at all. Don't forget transporting is an option.
Do you need to transfer the files? or could you just use an external you share between different PCs?
If an external works, but seems inconvenient, you can fix that by having the drive connected to a USB switch. When connected to a switch you can press a button or use a remote to change which PC the drive is connected to giving you instant access to the drive contents without having to sync/copy anything over.

Links below for examples of USB switches
https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Sharing-Computers-Peripherals/dp/B083JKDNRJ/
https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Computers-Peripherals-Indicators-USB-SW30/dp/B074TYDJK2/

If you want the bare minimum fast transfer and both PC are in local network, use Dukto-R6. It's super basic file copying, you just need to drag and drop.

For more advanced options,the others have already pointed it out.

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This will depend on the relative placement of these PCs

rsync over a wired network. That way, I can stop and resume at any time.

Simplest method is to copy via normal drag and drop, provided you have halfway decent hardware copying locally on the same network and a wired connection, 1Terabyte will not take too long, maybe a few hours on a standard Gigabit connection.

There are other options as the Windows SMB network protocol can be a bit slow.

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Simplest method, use FTP to copy the files over at "line speed" - you can use filezilla in both client and server versions.

​

If you are using Linux, you can also use "rsync" to copy files over to a remote machine, "Syncing" means it compares the files on source and destination and only copies the differences, this is a more efficient way to copy files. Do some research on the command to use, I usually use some variant of rsync -av /source/folder/ user@server:/destination/folder

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Windows also has a similar file syncing tool called "robocopy" (it's built in to every version of Windows since WinXP), With this you can also use something called "Multithreading" to copy lots of files at once if you have a lot of cores (be careful that the destination has a few cores as well as this can saturate a network link). Basic robocopy command (with threading) example is:"robocopy.exe c:\source \\server\destinaton /copy:DAT /xo /r:1 /w:1 /mt:4 /np /e" (syncs files, ignoring older files in destination, copying Data/Attributes/Timestamps, does not show progress - clutters screen, only tries once and waits 1 second for the retry - can always re run if lots of failures, copies all folders (even empty ones) to preserve structure, and uses 4 CPU threads to prevent big files stalling the copy) Lots more options but this should do for the basics. (using /COPYALL needs you to run in Administrator mode on terminal window due to the auditing admin rights this uses, not needed in most cases and won't work if you aren't copying NTFS to NTFS)

External usb hdd

I've been sending 10TB from one PC to another on my network over the last 2 days, it's nearly done. It's a wired network, and while sometimes I use tools like robocopy for more granular control over the the copy settings and logging of any copy errors, I generally find the standard windows copy tool to be faster.

Shouldn't actually take too long... I'd just take a couple sata cables. I transferred 6tb in about 12 or 18 hours, idr.

Rclone

Just use gigabit networking. You are looking ~4h/TB give or take depending on a few factors.

Over a network.

Not WiFi though!

You could hook a single network cable between them. Give each machine an IP address, share the folder that you are copying to or copying from (your choice) and drag the files over. Or you could use RoboCopy to potentially do it faster.

Or just get a 2tb usb external drive and use that, it could be slower or perhaps faster than the network option depending on many factors but also more expensive as you have to buy the drive!

You could go over a wired network.

1 Tb shouldn't be too bad. You could try an external HD, but that becomes a double operation (1 copy to the drive, 1 copy off) or use your home network.

Create a share of the folder(s) you want to copy and then access from the new PC to copy and paste to. Speed will depend on your network speed AND drive speeds.

rsync over sshfs over Ethernet.
I transferred 10 Tb over night, but it depends on how many files do you have.

robocopy or rsync if you can't place the drive in the target or an external enclosure.