SSD imaging device
Author
Discussion

red_slr

Original Poster:

20,876 posts

219 months

Friday 21st August 2020
quotequote all
I am looking for a stand alone box that I can plug a laptop SSD into and it will image onto another formatted SSD.

Then I will take the new SSD (larger capacity) and put it into the old laptop and it should fire straight up, right?

I had a look on amazon but seems to be unclear if these units work stand alone? Anyone know of a box that will do this thats say £50-£100?

Mr Pointy

13,418 posts

189 months

Friday 21st August 2020
quotequote all
Are you unable to use the normal Macrium & USB to SSD adapter route?

red_slr

Original Poster:

20,876 posts

219 months

Friday 21st August 2020
quotequote all
I would just like the simplicity of slot the drive in and press a button and its done. I think these things do exist?


Mr Pointy

13,418 posts

189 months

Friday 21st August 2020
quotequote all
Disk cloning is usually pretty straightforward but on a couple of occasions I've needed to do some further work to get the new SSD to boot, which is why the first step with Macrium is to create a Rescue disk/stick. Unless you're looking at cloning hundreds of disks I'm not sure what the advantage of spending £100 is over spending £7 on a USB to SSD adapter lead.

sgrimshaw

7,587 posts

280 months

Friday 21st August 2020
quotequote all
red_slr said:
I had a look on amazon but seems to be unclear if these units work stand alone? Anyone know of a box that will do this thats say £50-£100?
This one says it works standalone:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wavlink-External-Docking-...

From the item details:



and another:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01K7GXMTC/ref=sspa_dk...

In fact there are loads on Amazon, what did you search for wink


red_slr

Original Poster:

20,876 posts

219 months

Friday 21st August 2020
quotequote all
Thats the one I saw, was just wondering if anyone had any feedback. For 30 quid I have ordered one, hopefully it does the job but the reviews are a bit mixed.

sgrimshaw

7,587 posts

280 months

Friday 21st August 2020
quotequote all
red_slr said:
Thats the one I saw, was just wondering if anyone had any feedback. For 30 quid I have ordered one, hopefully it does the job but the reviews are a bit mixed.
Don't have that device itself but have other Wavlink kit ... all been fine.

Great thing with Amazon is their return policy .... "should" you find it doesn't work as advertised, you can return it for full refund smile

phil4

1,651 posts

268 months

Friday 21st August 2020
quotequote all
If you're just doing a straight copy from one to another it sounds fine, but as others have said sometimes you need to do realignments etc. Likewise if you're moving from small SSD to large, you don't want a clone, as that won't make any use of the extra space*.

As such there's a reasonable chance you'll need to do more work than just cloning it.

  • yes, I know, you can create another partition, but depending on the user, that may still leave them out of space on the boot device. And yes you can expand partitions, but none of this is covered by a device that clones.

DanoS4

869 posts

224 months

Friday 21st August 2020
quotequote all
FWIW, I'm using the SSD/USB cable route too.

Sorry to thread hijack, but say I want to go from a bigger drive to a smaller one......... is there such thing as a selective clone option? (ie to not copy over certain files or apps)....

S6PNJ

5,851 posts

311 months

Friday 21st August 2020
quotequote all
DanoS4 said:
FWIW, I'm using the SSD/USB cable route too.

Sorry to thread hijack, but say I want to go from a bigger drive to a smaller one......... is there such thing as a selective clone option? (ie to not copy over certain files or apps)....
Assuming you want to copy all files, but the original disk itself is larger, then simply partition it down to the new disk size or smaller and do the copy. If you want to selectively copy files, I'd suggest partitioning again, then copying the unwanted files to the new partition and then doing a clone of the wanted partition.

xeny

5,519 posts

108 months

Friday 21st August 2020
quotequote all
red_slr said:
Thats the one I saw, was just wondering if anyone had any feedback. For 30 quid I have ordered one, hopefully it does the job but the reviews are a bit mixed.
I've used a couple with various branding, they work fine. People tend to get unhappy when they prove unable to clone an already iffy mechanical drive.

buggalugs

9,292 posts

267 months

Friday 21st August 2020
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A lot of modern laptops use m.2 rather than SATA so be aware

Jessicus

374 posts

176 months

Friday 21st August 2020
quotequote all
I've got one of these:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inateck-3-1gen1-Dual-Bay-...

Recently used it to clone SSD's for work - no PC needed and cloned a 240Gb drive in about 30 minutes. Cloned 40 over a few days, no problems.

red_slr

Original Poster:

20,876 posts

219 months

Wednesday 9th September 2020
quotequote all
Just an update finally got round to doing it. Worked perfect using the wavlink box.
The burn from one to the other took maybe 10 mins tops.
Then just went into disk manager and expanded the volume and job done.

Thanks all.