Cloning a non-system hard drive

Since there are about a million different pieces of software and another million articles describing what to do, I'm hoping to get some clarity from the community about hard drive cloning. I'm going to replace the 750 GB hard drive in my signature and would like to clone it to a new one. It's not a system drive, merely storage for my games and other files. What's simplest, and preferably free, way to do this from a software perspective? Since the drive is NTFS, it would probably be easier to use a Windows-based solution, yes? Also, is it best to put the new/destination hard drive in my machine, put the old/source drive in my external dock, and then clone it? Or is it more advisable to put the destination drive in the dock while running a cloning process with the existing drive already in place?

Thanking you in advance.

 

If you don't mind the old school interface, a bootable clonezilla flashdrive or disc will do the job. You could also use EaseUS Partition Master or Macrium reflect (I think) as well. Where you put the drives when you clone doesn't matter.

 

You could even just use teracopy/robocopy in Windows. Install the new drive, copy the contents over, remove the old drive, and reassign the same drive letter to the new drive.

 

I'll look into EaseUS. Clonezilla won't work because the destination drive is smaller than the source.

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to say, that's not going to work either because my SSD contains the two operating systems (OS X + Windows) so it can't be moved. The cloning must be done via an external dock and the optical bay.

Appreciate the responses so far.

 

use easus to partition things. Once you have the same partition sizes you can use clonzilla to my exact copies of each partition. That's how I got around the smaller drive clone. But I'm sure there are better solutions.

 

Couldn't you do the same thing, except with the new drive connected via USB or eSATA?

Although I don't know if that would potentially break any registry links, or whether you could assign the original drive letter to the new drive without formatting the data you just transferred over.