Tuesday, March 6, 2018

usb 3 - Free program to clone 3TB hard drive to another one with USB3 support in Windows 7?

All I'm trying to do is clone one WD 3TB GPT drive to another identical drive. One is internal, one is attached with a USB 3.0 dock. I'm copying from internal to external drive.



  1. Macrium Reflect Free doesn't recognize either of the 3TB drives.

  2. DriveImage XML will see both drives (if run as administrator), but will not list the USB 3 drive as a target drive when it's time to pick the target drive.

  3. Ease US free edition doesn't support over 1TB.

  4. Paragon's software doesn't seem to support drives the use GPT.

  5. Clonezilla runs on a live CD, so I'd have to shut down my computer for hours while it copies the drive.


I just cannot believe that something so incredibly simple as cloning one drive to another can't be done, because software can't handle > 2TB GPT partitions or USB 3.0 connections. I'm absolutely baffled that such a basic operation isn't included in an operating system like Windows 7 (like how it can't mount an ISO, even though Microsoft distributes everything as ISO [Windows 8 supports it finally]). It's sad.


BTW, The only "killer app" I could find to clone my HDD to SSD was "Paragon Migrate OS to SSD", which copied my OS, shrunk the partition, and aligned the partition properly for SSD with like 2 clicks. I swapped in the new drive after about 11 minutes of copying, and it booted on the first shot, even though I cloned it with a windows update restart pending. I was impressed.

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