Using Cloning software taking too long?

Yes hooking the hard disk up directly will make it go a lot faster.

If there is no way to cancel True Image in mid-operation, you are right to just power off. But wait - can you at least click on the upper right "X" in the True Image window to shut down the software before powering down the machine? Either way, this may leave a mess on the new drive. Once you mount it in your machine and re-start, I suggest you use True Image first to Delete any Partitions that exist so that it can start fresh.

UPDATE for you guys ive attach the new drive its its going superfast now so hooking a hd to dockstating from USB = Slow hooked up to the inside = much faster! i feel dumb now but thanks evongugg & Paperdoc

I don't have the explanation for this, but there is more to the picture than interface speeds. Typical actual performance tests of USB2 vs SATA or eSATA show that SATA is maybe twice as fast, maybe less. Yet OP's problem was cloning a 700 GB HDD (presumably NOT full) and it had taken 24 hours to go 18%. That projects to over 5 days for the clone operation on USB2, and that is NOT normal. I'm just glad the direct internal SATA connection is working much faster.

Surda and others, don't get caught comparing specs for maximum burst speed achievable. The 3.0 Gb/s or ~300 MB/s is the spec for the maximum speed of a burst of data from the drive, but it excludes all the important things that slow it down, like head seek, rotational speed, etc. In fact, what people actually get is MUCH slower than that, leaving some wondering what is wrong with their HDD units.

What you need to compare is actual measured average data transfer rates in test lab simulations of real-world tasks. They have been published in reviews here at Tom's and elsewhere over the last few years. That is what I referred to when I said SATA may be up to twice as fast as USB2, but not more. Those tests also verify that the difference between original SATA and SATA II is small (which leaves me wondering about SATA 3!).