Both source drives were 2 TB (1.82 TB available) and so were both destination drives. I don't copy drives that frequently, so I was a bit unfamiliar with the steps. Both drives were data drives, so I ran it from IFW installed on the system (no need to run it from an external USB device).
The first source drive was partitioned as MBR, the second source drive was partitioned as GPT. I kept this partitioning as-is with the copies (if it ain't broke...).
The first copy was from a WD Black to an identical drive. I used the Normal Operations mode that I've been using for years for backups (including byte-for-byte validation) and all went fine. The 'Data Processed' was a little over 4 TB (I don't remember the exact amount, maybe 4.1 or 4.2 TB?), I expected double the amount of data due to the byte-for-byte validation, and I figured the extra amount above that was for some sort of additional overhead when verifying, so it didn't bother me. The copy went smoothly. It took around 5.5 hours and so far the copy is working fine.
The second copy was from a Seagate ST2000DM001 (Barracuda?) to a WD Black. The destination drive was SLIGHTLY bigger (if I had done a straight copy there would have been an extra partition at the end of about 1 MB). Because I didn't want to deal with the 'Scale to Fit' and/or the 'Scale to Target' settings (it was late and I rarely deal with those options), I followed TeraByte Support's suggestion in this forum and changed the settings to "Simple Operations and let the program handle it all for you".
This copy also went fine, however it took 7 hours and 6.99TB of data were processed. I want to find out why it needed to process about 75% more data than the first copy (and therefore take an extra 1.5 hours). I have two theories:
- Was this because of the resizing due to the 1 MB discrepancy that Simple Operations mode handled automatically?
- Would it have processed the same amount of data had I used Normal Operations mode and used the proper 'Scale to" settings?
- Or was there something else in Simple Operations that increased the amount of data and time for the copy (if so, what was the 'something else')?
- Was the time/data discrepancy due to the first set of drives being MBR and the second set of drives being GPT?
- If this was the reason, would changing the destination drive to an MBR partition reduced the amount of data processed (and also reduced the time)?
Again, this second copy went fine, so now I'm just curious for possible future copies. If I had known ahead of time that this second copy would take an extra 1.5 hours, and this was due to some sort of rescaling, I probably would have stayed in Normal Operations mode, not done any 'Scale to' option and accepted the trivial 1 MB partition at the end of the drive (saving 1.5 hours would have been worth it).
I have several screen shots and copies of the command line syntax for both copies, if that would help diagnosing this.