I’ve replaced my old laptop with a new one and I have over 350GB worth of data to move over, moving all of it to an external drive and then moving them to the new laptop doesn’t seem efficient and it seems like it’s gonna take forever
I know there are some special cables that can do that but I don’t wanna waste money on something that I’m only gonna use once every 5 years at most.
I know it’s not an answer to the cable question. But you should really consider sync thing. It’s open source you can run a server on your local network and a client on your other comouter and move all the files over just using your local networking. It’s painless. Open source. End to end encrypted. So in the scenario the special cable would just be Ethernet or Wi-Fi
use smb ftp sftp or something similar, just make sure both laptops are connected to the router with ethernet. if the old laptop has its storage easily accessible then I might also just take it out and plug it into my sata dock
A regular ethernet cable is sufficient in most cases. Except for ancient network cards, most newer ones know to flip the wiring to be able to communicate between two computers.
The only thing is that you need to set the network options manually in both computers - set the IP address and subnet. Then just transfer it using any network file sharing protocol. (Windows already has file sharing, Linux you can use sftp, or use a http server)
Edit: Looks like you asked specifically for USB. Sadly that is not possible specifically with usb since both devices are “hosts”. I provided this solution since ethernet cable are also very common and cheap to use
If speed is your concern, you may also want to try network cable or wifi. You can share, access, and copy files over the network.
For USB, if you can use a USB 3 Port specifically it’ll be faster than USB 2 ports.
I’m not familiar with direct us pc connections. When you connect the two via USB, the OS may ask you what kind of connection it is. One will have to serve as the host or controller, and the other as a device like a storage device.
If you’re on the same network I would just use Filezilla ftp client. Download it on both devices and you can transfer whatever between them.
Are you planning on keeping the old laptop? If it’s not a proprietary drive type you could probably just take it out and pop it into your new computer. Most newer laptops can support two
SSD. If they’re both M.2 drives you wouldn’t even need a new cable, just a screwdriver.
