I like an external 2-bay dock with cloning capability. I clone a lot of drives other than my primary. One odd thing. It used to take about 5-10 minutes to clone a 240-256GB SATA III SSD, now some of them are taking almost an hour, and I have no idea why.
my disk cloner takes almost a whole day to clone a 2 terabyte drive (HHD)
I cloned a drive once, and went to take the new drive out of the cloner, and static electricity popped from the drive to my hand- and apparently it fubarred the clone contents- I had to wipe disk again with reformat, and start over (it worked the second time)
I like an external 2-bay dock with cloning capability. I clone a lot of drives other than my primary. One odd thing. It used to take about 5-10 minutes to clone a 240-256GB SATA III SSD, now some of them are taking almost an hour, and I have no idea whyTry a different cable, or drive. Check what is using CPU cycles. Task Manager (Ctrl, Alt, Del)
And sites such as http://pcpartpicker.com enable finding compatible parts at competitive prices, with overall better price for quality than you will get from companies you pay to buy a PC from.
Currently (10–22) part prices are overall low, and here is a build that costs less than $500 as of now (not including the OS).
https://pcpartpicker.com/user/PBJ/saved/8jRdbv
Component Selection Base Promo Shipping Tax Price Where
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600G 3.9 GHz 6-Core Processor (integrated video - card no needed) $129.00
Thermal Compound (USE!): Arctic Silver 5 High-Density Polysynthetic Silver 3.5 g Thermal Paste $5.99
Motherboard: MSI B450-A PRO MAX ATX AM4 Motherboard $89.99 $89.99
Memory: Silicon Power GAMING 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory $73.97
Storage: Silicon Power A80 512 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive $39.99
Storage: Leven JS600 512 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive $26.99
Case: DIYPC Solo-T2-R Black USB 3.0 ATX Mid Tower Case $36.99 $+9.99 $46.98
Power Supply: Thermaltake Smart 500 W 80+ Certified ATX Power Supply $34.99 $34.99
Case Fan: Xigmatek XAF 75.3 CFM 120 mm Fan $5.99
Case Fan: Corsair AF140L 67.43 CFM 140 mm Fan $4.99
$458.88