Cloning a Hard Drive Using the Wavlink Hard Drive Dock (4K) 

Just to confirm that I've used it for an old school HDD cloned to a brand new SSD. Worked perfectly.

Thanks Bob - a very well presented video and set of instructions. Thank you very much for making and sharing the video. :-) The cloning process is just that, it clones 1:1, regardless if the target drive is larger. That's what pretty much ALL hardware cloning devices do. They don't actually "understand" the data they are cloning (eg: FAT32, UFS, HFS+ etc partitions) - they clone using a very low-level access method, reading data bits one by one. So Wavlink had no false advertising there. The extra step of resizing the target drive's partition will always be required, if the target drive was larger than the source drive. I can also confirm that it clones SSD and traditional Spinning hard drives equally well.

Good video Bob. I've owned a Wavlink dock for about 2 years but never needed to clone drives. Instead, I was using it to transfer data from multiple smaller drive to larger drives. So when I needed to clone a drive (in the past I've used Symantic and Norton Ghost) I no longer had the instruction booklet. As I write this, I'm waiting from my clone to complete (a 1:1 of a 1 TB mechanical to a 1 TB SSD). I'll let you know the results when it's finished. Again, thanks for the good video. UPDATE: Everything went well. It took longer than expected; about 2.5 hours. Popped the SSD in the desktop and after loading drivers, it logged in to Windows just fine. I’m a happy camper. Thanks again for easy and detailed information.

One crucial, no pun intended, thing you left out is that you need to disconnect the USB cable from the computer before performing the cloning procedure or it will not work. Found this out through another video.

I have had a wavlink for almost a year, just looking at it. Your video was clear and precise. I now have the confidence I need to copy my Hard drive in my desktop to an SSD. Thank you!

Thanks for the great video Bob. Really helped me out. Cloned a 8tb HHD full of movies and TV shows in about 6 hours whilst stuck in doors in rainy London.

Thanks for the review, it helped me decipher the lights and buttons and understand how to use it with out googling the manual. 1) I think the product works as it should. The process of cloning a smaller drive to a larger drive with a piece of hardware, it cannot know how you want the destination to look. Like one of the commenters (Nick Henson) said, Windows's Disk Management is a easy tool to EXPAND a partition with. Free and simple. And maybe you don't want it to be full 100% but some other percent, you can do that too. 2) Yes this can do mechanical spinning disks, notice the flap on the source/destination that can go down, this is where the 3.5inch drive slides in.

You don’t need to download additional software to extend the partition. After putting the clone disk in the PC and booted it. Open Disk Manager, select the drive and then the partition. Then select extend partition and adjust setting to use all the available space. Alternatively, you can create a new partition and use it for data, leaving the original partition for the OS. You may want to shrink the OS partition and add the space to the data partition.

Thanks, Bob! I tried desperately searching for the manual PDF but came across your video and instantly solved how to do it. I didn't realize you had to press the button once more after holding it down.

Best and most concise video I've found. Thanks for this!

Thanks Bob this is the best for off line cloning. Thanks for showing how to use wavlink. Excellent 👍

Thanks for keeping this video posted Bob, just cloned my PS4 hard drive. This makes an excellent one-to-one copy. When cloning smaller SSD or hard drive to a bigger SSD or hard drive use AOMEO partition magic to extend a the partition on the ssd or hard drive. Excellent work thanks

Thank you for the concise and clear information without intolerable music or a self adulating 30 minute introduction complete with paypal link.

Makes me happy I bought this Wavlink dock.

I find it very useful, thanks and greetings from Mexico

Thank you for the video. I have one of these that I've been using as an external docking port to read data off a bunch of old hard drives I had in a box. Now, I'm getting ready to get rid of the old drives, but want to wipe them first. So, I wiped one drive and am using that for the source. I was having problems getting the cloning to start because the manual says you just hold the button until all the lights turn on. Well, they started flashing for a few seconds, then went off. It didn't mention that you had to let go and press it again to actually start the process. That step was important. Anyway, now that it's actually cloning, it seems to be a much faster way to wipe a bunch of drives since the data doesn't have to go through USB. Plus, it frees up my computer and I can put it into sleep mode while the drive clones. Overall, I'm happy with this device. It was a VERY easy way to go through all the old drives to find any data I may have missed. Just shut it off, drop the drive in, turn it on, and it shows up as an external drive. No need to make sure the SATA connectors are lined up properly. It works great for 3.5 or 2.5 drives, SSD or spinning media.

Thanks for the helpful video. I was able to clone a 1TB HDD (with Linux Mint) to another 1TB HDD without having to partition or extend a partition on the target drive. Just thought it would be helpful for your viewers to know this device did this seamlessly. I didn't format the new WD drive or anything else before cloning.

Came here because I just acquired one of these and couldn't get the standalone clone process to kick off; your "press the OTG button whilst the lights are flashing" tip was the missing piece of the puzzle. Writing this as I watch a 300GB WD3000GLFS (yes, an electromechanical VelociRaptor no less) clone to a 1TB Samsung 860EVO SSD. Cheers, Bob!

Thanks, Bob. It's a good video about the unit. I don't agree with you regarding the partition, since the system is cloning block by block what's in the source drive. Depending on the OS, there are srveral utilities to deal with that. Cheers.

Thanks for tutorial man I finally understand how to used it.

Thanks for the info, very helpful.

Bob, will you please confirm that the target hard drive was bootable immediately? A couple of things.. I am certain that it would work the same for any form of SATA drive, and Windows Disk Management would have worked to resize the main partition after cloning, or you could have hooked up the USB cable and used software to do the whole thing that way on the fly. Thanks for the video.

Thank you... Very nice video tutorial...

Thanks Bob. The video helped. Cloning right now. Looks like it's working. Not thrilled about having to re-partition after the clone. I guess you get what you pay for.

For a non SSD drive it takes a lot longer for cloning. I cloned a 1TB to another 1TB and it took almost three hours. Also, on the solid lights indicating it's done, I noticed that first the lights go solid blue, and then after a few minutes they turn off and only the red light at the top remains on.

Tried cloning my original 1TB Seagate SATA HD to a new fresh out of the wrapper 2 TB Seagate Barracuda SATA HD using the new Wavlink Duplicator. The red power light comes on, I hear the drives startup and spin, and both blue lights come on for source and target slots. However, when I press and hold the center button, it does not do what your video did with the whole circle flashing. It does nothing, just sits there with the power, source and target buttons lit. Any thoughts?

You can extend the partition of the cloned hard drive in Windows usings the Disk Management tool. No need to "download" an additional tool if the partition that you want to extend is the partition adjacent to the empty space to the right of the partition that you want to extend.

I think you can use disk management to resize the partitions or go command line.

You would think that they would have included instructions on their product. Regardless, thanks for taking the time to create the video. Your instructions worked perfectly on my unit. Thanks again : )

Great video!

Great video thank you! My Source Light and Target Light are blinking together and it seems I can't get them to clone for some reason. Is there a way to troubleshoot these WaaveLink Dual Bay devices?

Thanks for the helpful video

Hi again....my source hard drive is legacy mode I checked, so MBR. Can I duplicate this onto the ssd but have the ssd hard drive formatted to GPT? Then change in bios to UEFI? Does my target drive have to be formatted to MBR like the source?

Great video Bob can you please by any chance make n followup video on how to make the other space available plz and what software to use That was also exactly what i got the wavlink for and yes now im stil back to square one😢

Good video / well presented Bob - thanks! Do you know if it's possible to clone a drive without putting the source in the Docking Station? I need to keep working, and thus Source in my Lappy, but want to create a Clone at the same time...

Question: I need to copy to new drive. Does the new never used drive need to have Windows installed on it before it can be cloned?

after pressing and holding the clone button the blue 'Source' and 'Target' lights are flashing and I see 1 solid blue light spinning between each %. When I try pressing the clone button again nothing happens. I am trying to clone a 2TB SSHD to a 4TB SSD. Any ideas?

I just bought them one but some I put the source and target into 2 correct slot and pushed and hold release and one more push but the source keep blinking at 25% and not moving on. Can you help me with that?

does this clone it in its entirity ie if the source drive has an operating system on it, does it clone that as well?

needed this video. FYI Bob, it works with spindle drives too. i just cloned an SSD to a HDD.

Fantastic thank ypu for making this video

Hello! Thank you for the video! If the resource disk with operation system does not work and is possibly damaged, can it be cloned?

Hi May you make a tutorial to show us how was the way you did to fix this problem with the aomei partition assistant, please? And any similar app for Mac, play?

Can you use this to let you access the two hard drives just like an external hard drive on a pc?

Well done. You answered my one question which is what do the lights do when the cloning is done. I used my Wavlink to clon a 1TB HD to another 1TB HD. The source drive is from my WD Book World NAS system running RAID 1, which has a hardware problem, so I need to get the data off of one of the drives, using Linux. For reasons of safety I will be taking the data from the cloned drive and not one of the original drives. After that I will see if I can repair the system board on the NAS. Hopefully it's just a capacitor.

I’m using this to offline cloning old 1tb to new 2tb SSD. It’s been blinking at 25% for three hours. What happens if the process is stopped/interrupted? Will source data be lost? Or new SSD damaged? Or, can I have a redo without any issues?

making a copy/clone 500GB to 500GB, same size, both are SSD drives, running 12 hours and continues to do so. Should I stop, and try again, since the LED's continue to blink ? How long should it take ?

Bob, I have used the wavlink to clone both Sata and SSD. No issues cloning a Sata but like you mentioned in your video it will clone what ever the source size is to the target so if its not 1:1 then you have to go in and readjust the partition.

Thanks Bob - Question, did you have to first format your new Crucial SSD before inserting it into the Target bay connector, or did you just connected it in Target connector as is from the factory?

Hi, when I hold the button to start the cloning the source and target indicator blinks and the progress indicator just moves round in a quick circle.. any idea on why this is happening? Thanks

awesome video. i recently purchase one, however the lights just keep blinking after i hold the button and nothing happens. what should i do? i am trying to clone two ssd drive like yours. Thanks.

My C drive is cloned from 128 GB to 1TB but I can't allocate the free space on my 1TB SSD. Its grayed out when I try to use extend volume on disk management. Please Help me what I should do and what software you used to extend your C Drive after cloning. Any Help guys? Thank you!

Hi there, I have the Wavlink 3.0 and just plugged in my MacBook pros 500gb HDD and a Samsung 250 SSD. The light keeps flashing and will not go solid to start the cloning process - any ideas? Thank you

I may use it to clone drives in the future but I would like to use it just as an external hard drive bay and remove the 3.5” drives from my PC auto clean things up. Can this unit, once connected to PC from USB, be used just as external storage? I’d like to remove my 3HDDs and put games and files on my 2 largest of the drives and have it all as external storage.

iam working in a company with limited resources can i use this to colon company ssd to my new ssd to use the system as well as activated windows and Microsoft office?

Do you know what is the down point? It won't clone if the target size is smaller than the source, even if the contains of the source is 10GB out of 1tb and the Target is 512GB

As I type this, I'm cloning my WD 1 TB Enterprise drive from my desktop over to a TeamGroup AX2 1TB SSD - the load speed should be insane. :)

You didn't need to download software to extend the partition Bob. You can do that in Disk management in the OS.

Perfect, thank you!

By the way, thank you for the video. I saw two Wavelinks, one blue and one green. The green one is cheaper and came out almost a month earlier. I find this strange.

this is really useful.

Does it matter if part of the drive contains a partition that is formatted as bitlocker ?

Wish my Wavlink was that fast. .It took all day and night for the lights to become solid on mine and the cloning to finish. Source drive was a 800 MB spin hard drive. Target was a solid state one TB drive. After cloning, I hooked the USB cable to another windows 7 machine and it read both drives fine, but it would only read one drive in the toaster at a time. When I installed the cloned SSD drive in another machine that the source drive came from, that's when all heck broke loose. A lot of blue screens of death sprang into action and Windows started running scan disk and automatically putting in fixes, etc. After it finished, everything worked again, including the dual boot for the other side of the drive containing a Linux installation. Don't know why mine took all night when others said theirs only took less than an hour. I was happy that a solid state drive didn't have issues in an old win7 machine and Microsoft didn't ask for a license key usually triggered by a new drive.

Thank you so much!

Great video Bob ,W10 disk management tool in W10 can extend the volume

can i use it to clone drive with windows os to bigger ssd and replace the old smaller ssd with bigger fresh-cloned ssd drive?

Thanks Bob! Mac guy here, I had the same hope as you when I got mine and of course found out what you found out... the extra space wasn't available... so reading many of the comments everyone finds out that Windows 10 can "extend the partition'... nice to know LOL but what about us Mac guys? as many years as I've been "Mac" i've never even thought to "extend a partition"??.... hmmm anybody out there know if it can be done on a Mac formatted drive?? I guess I'll do some searching and see if it's doable... I'll come back and let folks know if I'm successful

cool, thx a lot fot this useful info

You could have used windows 10 Disk manager to resize your partition!Great Video, I haven't used mine in a while and looked up your video to find the cloning start sequence!

Good video. FYI, You can clone 2 drives of the same size. You can clone when the target is 2TB and the source is 1TB. You can't clone when the Source is larger than the target. Works on 3.5" drives, 2.5" drives, solid state, spinning... High power drives may need a bigger power supply for the Wavlink.

do u need to install new one in your computer to format or the tool does it byself

yes these are good i have used mine many times

I have one in mail coming. When you clone, why does it seperate the partition on your source hard drive to?

It works for most all drive HDD and SSSD. I own one

How long for a 2tb sshd to a 2tb ssd? Been stuck at 100% for a LONG time. Still waiting. Been cloning for over 9-10 hours. We did this on three other drives we cloned and it did not take this long.

Hello Bob, You don't need any software like Aomei, just go to disk management on Windows and expand volume on there.

It works with solid state and non-solid state drives both. I have one and I've used it on both. I haven't found one yet that it wouldn't work on.

How did you guys use disk management to extend the partition.

If I have a 500gb HD and want copy windows to a 256GB ssd, I have about 200GB of dada. Could Iclone it?

It work with magnetic drive, tested it and work perfectly

What software did you use to Dre the extra space on you bigger drive?

Have you a video of the other process you had to go through

He said the Target drive had to be bigger than Source Drive. So this wouldn't work to clone from a 1-TB HDD over to a 1-TB SSD ?

I have never had the problem with repartitioning after cloning with this drive cloner. I don't know why you did. It may be due to the NAND style of your new drive, if you are cloning from a 3D NAND to a 2D like you did to that 960gb drive, this could be the cause. It does work with platter drives as well. You can even clone from a HDD to an SSD!

might try again but next time preformat the SSD first in your computer then clone the drive and see if that works out better for you ..

Thanks 🙏

Nailed it!

Thanks bob great video I've got a cheap 240gb SSD installed in my pc. I'm going to clone to an SSD crucial 240 GB. IT SEAMS THIS WAVE LINK will help me do that. quite easily. Thanks for the help bob. tony uk

You didn't have to use the downloaded software. You could have used the Disk Management took to make the HDD bigger. It's already installed in windows.

I have a 1tb hdd in my computer but the computer says 43gb used and 106 free. that is only 149gb..the question is can I clone this to a 250gb ssd? please anyone.

Time of clon D. D 1tb?

FREE = Windows has drive management where you can 'extend' the '128gb' disk to it's full size. In short, when cloning, make sure your target is equal or larger in size. If you're rolling out an image to lots of disks, make sure it's a small disk (32gb) or enough to hold all data, then it can roll out to equal or larger disks...which if larger, you use Windows built in disk management to extend the small disk to the disks actual size. If you have small partitions between the imaged disk and the unallocated space, then you can't extend...the unallocated needs to be next to the 'disk' (partition) you need to extend. Very simple stuff.

how come the extend drive feature in windows 10 didn't work

Bought one on sale but see no reason to use it for cloning, I use only for file transfer between two 3.5" drives. For cloning it makes far more sense, in my little mind, to just buy a single $8 drive enclosure and the free Macrium Reflect Fuse. Dead simple interface, faster with on screen progress bar, able go to smaller target drive as long as data fits and no need to resize partition as it's done automatically. The drive case you bought is now for your old drive to be formatted or locked away to re image in the future.

You should try and clone a IDE Drive to an SSD drive using an IDE to Sata adapter just as an experiment and see if it would work.Nothing to do with what you needed to clone

I'm not sure if anyone else has mentioned but that is very normal to have that extra space unreadable. You are cloning. This means that you are making a 1 to 1 copy basically. It has no way to know what to do with the rest of the space so once you add it to your computer, you can go into computer management and finish making the rest of the drive readable. I see on the video that you downloaded a program to help you out with that which is great but when you said you had bad news, I thought uh-oh... something bad is to be expected... Turns out that it really wasn't bad news. Your expectations just weren't set properly. Anyone getting this should know that whatever cloning device you use, if the target is bigger than the source then you will always have that leftover space that you have to manage yourself.

You have to test this thing out with 2 HDD drive (old spinning)

You don't need to download software to extend your partition, most operating systems natively support extending a partition. A quick google should be sufficient.

So you just swap out the drives and turn on the pc and the windows 10 operating system will work ? !!!!!

Thanks