I've opted to rid myself of any media smaller than 1T. This calls for "upgrading" the media in some of my smaller machines and appliances.
My approach is to use a CZ "live disk" (3.3.1-35 amd64 in this case), booting from it on the machine having the disk to be replaced while the replacement disk sits in an external dock:
- select "device-device"
- select "Expert" (reviews ALL the options that are available)
- select "disk to local disk" (target must be spun up before this)
- select source disk (note the description of each probed drive)
- select target disk (note source disk has been removed from list)
- accept default options (but peruse just in case)
- select "-fsck" to give the source an interactive check prior
- select "-k0" to use the existing partition table (in most cases)
- select "do not copy log files" (avoid panic if tries to write R/O media)
- select "-p choose" to give you the option of what to do after done
- press ENTER to continnue
- "y" confirm desire to perform the operation
- "y", again! (yes, I really DO want to do this!)
Sit back and wait -- note yellow and red text messages are important, the rest flies by too quickly for you to really read ("trust it")
The NTFS drives I'm copying have two partitions (the 100M system partition and the "rest of the disk"). Each is copied separately at about 3G/min (for the "data in use"). Throughput varies with drive, h/w i/f and host CPU (don't even think of using anything USB2-based).
[I'm unsure if it uses separate read and write threads or if it lacks this sophistication. Regardless a dual dock likely would serialize accesses to the drives]
Progress and estimated completion are indicated graphically and numerically. E.g., ~210GiB in use of 689GiB (750GB) capacity is initially estimated at 1:05 but actually takes 1:19 (~2.6G/min)
Replacing the source with the target and booting to Windows, access (as Administrator) the "Disk Management" and "Extend" the partition to consume the extra "unused" space now available.