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I have local 2 drives, neither of them my Windows boot drive:

  • A 2TB HDD, drive letter E:. Contains about 300GB of data.
  • A 1TB SSD, drive letter F:. Contains about 4GB of data.

I want to swap the contents of these drives. I can do this with Windows Explorer, but that would create a copy of the data in the destination drive, leaving me to need to delete the original files from the source drive.

Is there a way to just move the files between drives without needing to copy the files, then deleting the original?

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  • Try the Windows Command MV: learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/…
    – John
    Aug 28 at 19:51
  • given that you move between drives, the data itself will move by making a copy and then deleting the original. It will be slow regardless. But you can just make a selection, right-mouse-click, cut, destination, right-mouse-click, paste, and it will move the data.
    – LPChip
    Aug 28 at 19:55
  • Try Robocopy, learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/… , which has many options and is more efficient and robust at moving data. BTW, if the files and folders have different names, then this is simple... but if there is overlap of some, moving from A to B would overwrite those files, and then those in B could not be moved to A. You'd need a third drive (or move into subfolders).
    – DrMoishe Pippik
    Aug 28 at 20:54
  • Moving files between filesystems is always copying followed by deleting. Without deleting it would be just copying. Are you asking "how can I do this, so deleting happens automatically?"?
    – Kamil Maciorowski
    Aug 29 at 6:32

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Is there a way to just move the files between drives without needing to copy the files, then deleting the original?

This does not make sense. "Deleting the orginal" suggests that you made a copy, something you excluded.

"Swapping the contents" suggests that the F-drive uses a maximum of 300 GB. You could swap the drive labels.

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