How fast can you clone a 4T hdd?

[lostmind]

I used a wavlink 2-drive usb dock to clone a 4T sata hdd (WD blue) to a 4T sata ssd (samsung EVO 870) and it took more than 6 hours to complete 75% -- then I went to bed and next morning it's done. So I estimate it took 2 hours to clone 1TB.

Are there faster cloning methods, either hardware or software solution?
What's the fastest time you have seen or know of?

[fzabkar]

SATA-to-SATA is fastest.

[lostmind]

I did another clone from WD blue 4T to another WD blue 4T using the same wavlink and it is much faster -- finished in about 4 hours. So I guess ssd is not faster than hdd?!

The question still stands, is there a faster way to clone drives?

[fzabkar]

My answer still stands, SATA-to-SATA is fastest.

[mr44er]

So I guess ssd is not faster than hdd?!

No, if it's not the cheapest sh*t. Cheap consumer SSDs have a small write cache, and the chips 'behind' are too slow to write out the cache/buffer in time.

1. It makes a difference if you copy every sector or only the filled ones.
2. You can't write faster on the target than the source disk reads and delivers. Anything near 200MB/s sequential read is max. for spinning disks.