Hardware based drive cloning

[TruvisT]

Has anyone worked with hardware based devices that clone drives? Just curious how well they clone compared to doing things software style.

I have some businesses running old drives way past their the 3-5 year mark and I would like to get them all cloned over to new drives so the workstations run faster. It has been a horrible battle as I've been fighting hard drive crashes all year long. Also curious as to how well hardware based devices handles possible errors as well as going from a smaller drive to a larger drive.

Right now all I do is plug drives in via SATA cords to my data recovery/clone stations and do everything by software but if things can be done as simple as plug drive in to device and clone over that would be easier and nicer.

 

[trewq]

Any reason you need a hardware cloning device?


I would just use http://clonezilla.org


Edit: I'm an idiot for not reading the whole OP...

 

[mojeda]

We have a nine drive hard drive duplicator where I work (1 source drive, 9 destination drives) and it works pretty flawlessly. It will duplicate from a smaller drive to a larger drive but not the other way around, you will also need to resize the partition either with windows vista and upwards, Windows XP does not allow resizing of partitions of the drive XP is installed on. You could also boot to a live gparted disk and do it that way.

I think there is an option to automatically resize it but I have not tried it...

http://www.addonics.com/products/hd9sndxhs.php

Addonics have smaller ones (1:1 disk duplicators) however I do not have experience with these.

Drive duplicators are not exactly cheap, unfortunately. If you just have a couple of drives I would just stick with clonezilla.

 

[TruvisT]

We have a nine drive hard drive duplicator where I work (1 source drive, 9 destination drives) and it works pretty flawlessly. It will duplicate from a smaller drive to a larger drive but not the other way around, you will also need to resize the partition either with windows vista and upwards, Windows XP does not allow resizing of partitions of the drive XP is installed on. You could also boot to a live gparted disk and do it that way.

I think there is an option to automatically resize it but I have not tried it...

http://www.addonics.com/products/hd9sndxhs.php

Addonics have smaller ones (1:1 disk duplicators) however I do not have experience with these.

Drive duplicators are not exactly cheap, unfortunately. If you just have a couple of drives I would just stick with clonezilla.

Thanks for the information. I will check them out.

Do not mind spending money on quality duplicators. I have done so much work with hard drives that unless the clone requires babysitting, I just would like to plug in and a do a 1:1 and move on. Not have to worry about CLI, menus, drive selections, ect... saves time.

 

[dcdan]

The main issue with most sub-$1000 cloners is if something goes wrong during the process (bad sector, etc), they either freeze, or (even worse) make it look like the process is complete when in fact not all data was transferred. If you decide to go for a cheap one, make sure it has a disk compare option to run as as second pass to compare source to target.

What I am trying to say is - unless you are willing to spend $1k+, stick with a software solution, it will be more reliable. Use ddrescue for damaged drives.