u/Willing_Professor_13

I'm upgrading an older desktop from an HDD to an SSD, but there's a problem: the PC only has room for one drive, so I can't connect both drives internally at the same time.

I was wondering if it's possible to clone the HDD to the SSD over my home network instead.

My idea was something like: Old PC (HDD installed) → WiFi/LAN → another computer with the new SSD connected

A few questions:

• Is network-based disk cloning actually practical?
• How much slower is it compared to direct cloning?
• What happens if the network connection drops during the process?
• Would creating a disk image first and restoring it to the SSD be a better approach?
• Are there any beginner-friendly tools that support this workflow?

For those who've done something similar, what would you recommend as the simplest and safest method? Thanks!

I feel like the HDD market has gotten kind of weird lately, and I'm not sure what the "normal" way to buy drives even is anymore.

Prices don't seem to behave like they used to. I always assumed if you wait, things get cheaper, but recently it feels like the opposite is happening.

From what I've noticed:

I'm trying to figure out what actually makes sense right now, and I keep going back and forth between different approaches:

But none of these feel like a clearly "right" move in the current market.

So I'm curious what everyone here is doing.