Windows 10: Can I use an external drive to swap internal memory drives?

I have two internal drives, both 1 TB each. I purchased a 2 TB internal drive that I want to install, but I don't have enough space on the current drives to push everything to one drive, remove the other one, and install the 2 TB one. Can I use an external drive to transfer a drive to, install the new drive, then transfer back? What if the internal drive is my "system drive" with Windows installed on it? Sorry for the non-technical jargon, hopefully the question makes sense

:)

 

Internal Drive+Enclosure or External Drive

Hi, I'm not very familiar with storage solutions so I was wondering if you guys could help me out. I'm looking to buy a 1TB+ drive for backup. External drives seem like more elegant solutions but when I looked on Newegg many reviews seem to suggest that they are not long lived (e.g. break within weeks/months). Is this true? If so, are internal drives + enclosures better? Or do any of you have better solutions that I don't know about (like I said I'm not that familiar with the storage department). Thanks.

 

Internal Storage Devices swap drive letters

The machine has a M.2 PCLe NVMe SSD (the system drive), an internal HDD storage drive, and an internal optical drive
The SATA controller was set as RAID at the factory. I never enabled RAID on the system by any means to create RAID volumes.

The BIOS lets me change the SATA Controller to RAID or to AHCI.
I recently made the change from RAID to AHCI in the BIOS using safemode boot procedure steps.

Something I didn’t expect happening during this change was the internal optical Drive and the internal HDD swapping drive letters.
Maybe I’m being a little overly apprehensive. If the data can't be restored one day for whatever reason, would keeping the drive letters the way they are assigned now and making all new backups of personal data, and creating new DVD rescue disks, and new backup DVD’s be the more prudent step to ensure the data integrity for the lack of a better term ?

It's easy to reassign the drive letters following the excellent tutorial
“Change and Assign Drive Letter in Windows 10 by @Brink which offers a way for correcting this on-board SATA port redirection that maybe occurred or whatever, except.....
every DVD burned, every personal file ever backed up on the external drive using SyncBackFree, the rescue DVD, all originally created with the opposite drive letters, draws concern of potential file unrestorability, and DVD data unreliability.

I only mention my skepticism changing the drive letter of a storage device back to what it originally was and potentially not being able to restore back ups only because some have attested that trying to restore personal files to the internal HDD lead to headaches.

Any comments and suggestions are welcomed and appreciated.

Not to get off the subject but,
The Storage controller driver that installed is a Standard Microsoft NVMe driver. Any suggestions on this generic driver are also very much appreciated.

 

HELP!!! External Drive issues!!

you're in luck, the guy with way too much external storage is here to the rescue!


step 1: try with a different USB cable

step 2: take the drive out of the enclosure and connect it internally to your PC

quite likely the cable or enclosure has died. if you're re-initialising the disk you might actually be erasing it... so dont do that.