Issues Migrating To New Hard Drive

Last week, one of my storage drives started getting slowdowns whenever I accessed a file on it.
Through chkdsk and Western Digital's Lifeguard Support I discovered that it was failing.

I RMAed it, and while waiting for the replacement to me mailed, I managed to move all the data on there to temporary spot on a larger storage drive using Unstoppable Copier.
The issue I'm having is that everything that I moved from the old drive is now larger than the identical new drive, even though I had about 300 gigs free on the old drive.
I had saved partial downloads from Utorrent on it and I've deduced that in the migration, it took all the incomplete files at their full size rather than at what was actually there.

How can I successfully move everything to the new replacement? I haven't sent the original drive back to WD yet, but it took me 4 days to copy the files the last time.

 

I will assume a Microfoft user.
There are many programs that make clones of disks. Connecting the new disk via a sata-usb caddy. It is easy when you know the procedure.
Good luck with the adventure.
s.

Of course you can connect via a sata cable and plug her into the motherboard.

I used Acronis 2014 true image software and have no regrets.

 

Yes sorry, Windows 7 x64, and the drive is a Western Digital 1 TB Black drive. I've currently got the original in my Sata-USB caddy, and the new one directly connected to the motherboard.

I'm in the process of trying to clone the original drive to the new one using AOMEI Backupper, but as the drive's failing the remaining time currently fluctuates between 143 hours to 436 hours.

 

My guess is that the spindle motor is the issue, and the motor RPMs are fluctuating.

If such is the case, there is not a whole lot to do but wait, or select only the most important folders.

As I tell all my clients, there are three rules when it comes to data:

1. Backup
2. Backup
3. Backup.

This also means having a viable backup image of your system on an external or separate internal drive.

 

I couldn't do a disk image as the program needed to run chkdsk before starting (which it couldn't finish as it kept failing chkdsk), but I've already copied the entire drive to one of my backup drives.

My issue is that in the past when I was using Utorrent, when I selected specific files in larger torrents it saved fragments of the rest of the files. On the original drive, the actual space taken up by files is 750 gigs. But when I copied them over to the temp drive, Windows made them take up all the displayed space. So the copy now takes up 983 gigs.

Let me try an example:

I download the BitTorrent music/video bundle they offer, which has multiple songs and videos, but I only choose one.
My Utorrent not only downloads the one I want, but a part of the song before and the song after.
So sitting in the destination directory is 3 files, the song I want and the parts of the other two.
Now on my drive it says that each of the unwanted files takes up 20mb but the actual space taken up is 359kb.
When I copy the files using Unstoppable Copier to my temp drive, it read those 359kb files as their displayed 20mb, and wrote them as 20mb.

 

If your machine is a desktop there might be an additional sata input on the motherboard -and a spare power cable. Copying speeds significantly quicker.

Booting up from the original and cloning the disk onto the new drive is the way I would go. But I try to keep my OS disk to 40GB.

regards,
s.

 

I didn't think about connecting it directly to the motherboard til after I started cloning... =^\

My OS is on a separate SD drive, the drive that's failing is only storage.

Good news is that after the initial slowdown, the disk started spinning again, so I've only got 69 hours left...