It is not possible to copy one to another if logical sector size of target drive differs from logical sector size of source drive. That is because data integrity usually cannot be ensured between different logical sector drives. įrom Paragon kb : A hard disk (HDD) has physical sector size determined by its geometry and logical disc sector size. Info about logical sector size is stored in disk controller and is reported to operating system (OS), determining how OS sees this drive: as 512īytes per sector or as 4K per sector drive.Ĭommon drives have 512 bytes per sector both on physical and logical level, while Advanced Format Drives (AFD) have 4096 (4K) bytes per physical sector but emulate 512 bytes per logical sector. However some external USB boxes (especially if HDD was designed for external connection) provide 4096 bytes per sector for both physical and logical geometry.
Take hard disk out of external case (if vendor allows it) and use another SATA-USB case which will provide 512 bytes per logical sector (any cheap case should do it unlike special Seagate cases)Īlternatively, you can try to find a program that supports cloning irrespective of source and destination logical sector size ( see link to HDClone in later post) Take hard disk out of external case (if vendor allows it) and connect hard disk to PC via SATA port (in case of laptop with only one drive you may use SATA port for optical drive) Connect drive via eSATA cable (if external HDD case and PC itself support it) You will either have to find another external drive with the same logical sector size (I'm guessing 512 bytes) or you could try one of the workarounds offered by Paragon : It may be possible to copy one drive to another using the following workarounds: It is not possible to copy one drive to another if logical sector size of targetĭrive differs from logical sector size of source drive. This is like a previous comment saying that Acronis True Image is good cloning software. For both Acronis TI and DriveImage XML, when cloning to a disk with 512 byte sectors or with 512 byte emulation (512e), they will be good cloning software.īut there is nothing in any of the documentation (that I can find) for Driveimage XML that suggests it supports cloning to an external disk with 4K-native sectors. If you wish to see the sector size of your disks try this : Given the rarity of this feature, I would suggest that this is a bad sign.Īlso there is empirical evidence available to suggest that - at least in the past - DriveImage XML does not recognize external disks with 4K-native sectors.
In the search box, type System Information, and then, in the list of results, click System Information. In the window that opens, expand Components, then expand Storage and then click on Disks. You can then see the sector size beside "Bytes/sector" for each disk.
If you have a disk listed with 4096 bytes/sector and/or you have experience cloning from a 512 to 4096, this would be a good time to jump in.īut just saying that such and such program is a good disk cloning software may not be all that helpful because as larger (3TB or more) external usb drives become more plentiful, it may be that this question is repeated with some regularity. It has been a little disturbing to see how far I've had to dig to find information pertaining to this issue for each program. DriveImage XML has perhaps been the most disappointing for failing to address this issue at all.Acronis True Image 2017 has been released and we have a review of it here. It still works with previous versions of Windows. Most of the utilities from the past versions of the backup software are still available with some improvements as well. ACRONIS TRUE IMAGE 2014 CLONE TO DISSIMILAR SOFTWARE
Try&Decide has been brought back to the program by popular demand allowing you to Try potentially unsafe tasks and Decide whether to keep the change or discard it altogether. True Image Cloud is the program needed to backup to the Cloud and to external devices. This review of True Image will focus on taking an image backup of an Entire PC and take a look at some of the other useful tools included with the program. You can also back up files and folders with the program.īacking up an entire PC to an external drive is the easiest thing to do using the new True Image interface.