Quickest -

1. Take the lid off the source PC put the HDD in it
2. Copy the stuff.
3. Pull it out
4. Put it the other PC,
5. Your done

Formatting the HDD my be optional.

Connect both computers over ethernet and rsync the data across. It will still take several hours over gigabit ethernet though.

1. Take the drive from PC 1 and attach to PC 2 => copy / paste

2. External drive

Parallel port would be faster than serial, but if you’re using serial I’d go with Z modem for the compression and error correction.

Fastest “normal” way would be write it to a USB 3 drive on machine 1, read from drive later on machine 2. An SSD would be best. Even with having to do the write and read in two phases, I’d still expect it to be faster than a 1G network.

(Less normal ways would be things like Thundrerbolt SSDs, 10G or 40G ethernet for direct transfer, etc. But if you have that kind of tech already in place, then you’re not asking. ;)

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You could go over a wired network.

What is the best method?

Sometimes the best method isn’t a transfer at all. Don’t forget transporting is an option.
Do you need to transfer the files? or could you just use an external you share between different PCs?
If an external works, but seems inconvenient, you can fix that by having the drive connected to a USB switch. When connected to a switch you can press a button or use a remote to change which PC the drive is connected to giving you instant access to the drive contents without having to sync/copy anything over.

Links below for examples of USB switches
https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Sharing-Computers-Peripherals/dp/B083JKDNRJ/
https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Computers-Peripherals-Indicators-USB-SW30/dp/B074TYDJK2/

Shouldn’t actually take too long… I’d just take a couple sata cables. I transferred 6tb in about 12 or 18 hours, idr.

rsync over a wired network. That way, I can stop and resume at any time.

USB 3.1 Gen2 is hard to beat. 10Gbps. But for HDDs the HDDs themselves will be the bottleneck. For sustained file transfers, perhaps no more than up to 3Gbps, even if installed in the same PC. Good SATA SSDs may manage closer to 6Gbps. NVMe SSDs are likely to saturate USB 3.1 Gen2. Then PCI-e directly between installed drives is the fastest. Normal cabled network is only 1Gbps.

File transfers to/from external multibay USB DAS can be done in parallel, involving multiple HDDs, and come close to saturating 10Gbps USB3.1 Gen2 speeds.

Then there is thunderbolt.

Start a rsync transfer when you go to bed. In the morning it will most likely be done.

Over LAN with flavored solution of your choice.
Other than that, I use one of my spare drives and my USB docking station if I need to move it outside of my own house. I never really had a need for dedicated external drives but a docking station is handy for many things, this being one of them.

I have a PC in a spot of my house I can’t get a cable to. But that’s the PC I do my Blu Ray ripping and encoding on, so I keep a 5tb external drive for moving the files to my NAS afterwards. Sometimes it would take days over WiFi instead of minutes to hours over USB 3 twice. (and piss off my wife for saturating the wifi, heh)

I would write it to an nvme drive and swap that drive to the new pc

10 GbE. 17 minutes.

Of course you need disks that can read/write at that speed (1.25 GB/s). Should not be a problem for NVMe SSDs.