I was certain this would have been covered before, but I cannot find an answer amongst all the almost-duplicates that come up; sorry if I've missed something obvious.

I have a full 320gb disk inside my machine, a new 1tb disk to replace it, and a USB 2.0 chassis.

It is only data on a single partition, no OS/apps involved, and the old drive will be kept somewhere as backup (no secure wiping etc).

The simple option would be to put new disk in USB chassis, copy files, then swap them over.

But for USB pen drives, reading is around 4x faster than writing. If the same is true for a USB SATA chassis (is it?) then it would be significantly faster to swap the drives first and read from the old drive over USB, right?

Then the other consideration is that copying lots of files is usually slower than a single file of equivalent size. Is Windows 7 smart enough to do everything in a single lump like that, or is there specialised software that should be used instead?

(Even if SATA->SATA copying is faster than involving USB, knowing what to do when it isn't an option is useful information.)

Summary:

• Does a USB SATA chassis suffer from a read/write inequality? (like a USB pen drive does, but unlike a direct SATA connection)

• Can Windows 7 do sequential access? (I can't find confirmation if Robocopy does this.) Or is it necessary to use a bootable CD/USB with something like Clonezilla to achieve sequential copy speeds?