Has anyone tried cloning an NVME drive to an external NVME drive enclosure linked to a USB 3 connection?
My current 500GB NVME drive is getting a bit full so I’d like to get a larger 2TB one. I only have 1 socket on my motherboard so was looking at putting the new drive into an external USB connected enclosure and cloning to that.
Anyone got any recommendations of drive enclosures and the best cloning software to use?
Or would there be any problems trying to use this method for cloning?
Have you considered a PCIe adapter?
Thanks for quick reply.
Good idea will look into it, must admit I haven’t kept up with changes in PC hardware over the past few years , I didn’t realise they existed.
I got one for an older smaller drive I had and use it for my rolling cache, works great, comes with a little heat sink which is a great low cost purchase for these drives.
Is it easy to remove the drive once you have installed it in under the aluminium heatsink? The ones I’m looking at have a sticky heat transfer pad.
Once I’ve cloned my existing drive to the new one I intend to install it on the motherboard.
I could then obviously put my old drive into the adapter once I’m sure the new one is working ok.
I believe you could just boot from it and clone it from there?
I’m not sure how re-usable the pads are?
I’ve done this a couple times recently. It’s pretty straight forward using Macrium Reflect (free). Check out this tutorial. Works like a charm Macrium Software | Cloning a disk using Macrium Reflect 7
OK thanks guys, I’ll look into it? 
Got one, very cheap also and amazingly it works (find the model with no issues on f.i. Amazon) Mine boots my Win10
As for the OP I’m not sure USB 3.0 is fast enough so it might be worth checking your MB specs first. And if you do decide on a new MB I will suggest it should have at least one NVme PCI-e 4.0 slot for Community and Official. I expect this to come into it’s own once Direct Storage is fully implemented in the sim.
I wasn’t intending to use the enclosure to run the drive, just to clone my existing drive to the new one, then put that into the motherboard.
Oh OK. but even then it’s a good option for users without NVme.
My current board is only pcie 3.
I won’t be upgrading that for a few years I expect, though the speed of some of the pcie 4 drives I’ve seen looks impressive so I might be tempted
Just for cloning you won’t need to peel off the cover for the heat pad, it won’t get that hot
Ok thanks, I might get one of those then as I can then install my existing drive into it after the cloning.
may be FasterSplash723 done it, but with a little extra step of an external drive 
PS.: my recommendation is more easier way to buy a normal 2TB SATA SSD … it’s fast enought and you not need to touch your system drive.
Ah but will it be fast enough after DX12?
hmmm ?.. not exact sure about the relation SATA and DX12.
You get ~600MB/sec with SATA, more as enough also for the next years. The advantage of a M.2/nvme ( 3GB/s or so ) is currently practical only noticable in case you move a 200GIG video file from A to B
The higher amount ot IOPS is for a consumer PC also not realy relevant… Of course there are other reasons that a nvme drive is faster ( parallel blocks etc. ) , but it’s currently just not realy necessary ( and in my opinion have the most nvme drives a heat issue ). Of course the decision is by each user itself. My MSFS package content lies on a normal SATA SSD ( a old 860 EVO 2TB ).
PCI-e 4.0 NVme is potentially double that and while I can’t see a big advantage with functionality, once DX12 and Direct Storage is fully implemented in the higher LODs with the multipying effects of distance and data they should come into their own so long as peoples gpu’s are fast enough
ah… you meant not my post
PCI-e v4 is also not urgently necessary the next years. They speak allways about the theoretical increasments of bandwiths , but not the practical value.
For me is this sentence
absolutly correct. And this is comparable SATA vs NVME
DX12 will run also with PCI-e v3.