(SOLVED) T for Win -600MBs then 100MBs

[kris455]

Check your drives for fragmentation. I get 1200 MBps when there is no fragmentation. NVMe to NVMe.

what enclosure, what heatsink?

I do defrag fairly frequently - Puran, boot-time. C is 9% at the moment, E is 0%, the rest are tiny or one ext4, which is about the same size as C and takes about the same time to backup.
I am baffled

[Brian K]

Two internal Samsung NVMe 1 TB 970 Pro. Default M.2 heatsinks that came with the motherboard.

I suggest retesting your speed when your fragmentaion is 0%.

[kris455]

My thinking is it can't be fragmentation since I am able to easily get 400MBs when I back up to the SSD sata via usb.
Gotta be something else.

[Brian K]

I'm not using USB. Mine are two internal drives.

[TeraByte Support]

FWIW you can also use /iobs to limit the block size written to the drive.

[kris455]

1)ran some tests.
2)First and most important, I am only able (laptop) to run outboard via USB3, either A or special fast (for this laptop) C.
3)I compared Terabyte with "app-X" that backs-up at about the same speed via USB - most backup software out there runs hideously slow - I bought Terabyte a while back because it was fast.
4)App-X ran at about 6 min with small heatsink and no fan - about the same as Terabyte. heatsink was warm.
5)I put the big heatsink on the WD NVME and used Arctic Silver 5 on the 2 ICs. I pointed a 2" fan at it.
5a)I also did a boot time defrag with Puran on my 2 big NTFS partitions.
6)Ran Terabyte and it completed in about 5 min and did not drop speed - that is, it ran at an average of 350-450MBs as I would expect for a USB connection, BUT, the heatsink was bloody HOT.
7)I then ran app-X and it took 30 sec longer but the heatsink was COLD.

A) so it seems that defragging helped though not sure whether that or Arctic Silver or both contributed. If there is a better defrag, let me know - boot time capability makes it tons faster!

B) I must have shifted (a year ago) from sata SSD/adapter/USB to NVME/adapter/USB hoping things would be faster. And for a while I felt they were. Perhaps I did not do thorough tests. I feel I should probably go back to the sata SSD and use the NVMEs for "off-site" backup of that unit.

C) why was the big heatsink so much hotter when running Terabyte? If I make the change above, do I care? Probably not.

So I think this is solved by me going back to using the sata SSD, which I already have done. But I will leave this thread open for a bit for other comments , like better defragger (I have also used Defraggler and long ago used Acronis. Defraggler doesn't offer boot-time defrag and so takes forever(EDIT I just discovered it does so will play with that - which is better? )(EDIT2 I just tried it and it doesn't work for me.). Acronis just got slow back then. I have no idea how it is now.) Everything costs $ so it's a bit hard to tell...
Thanks all!

[Brian K]

I tried a SSD in a USB 3.2 dock. My results weren't as good as yours. Average 300, peak 350.

[kris455]

Found something called Ultradefrag for $20 that optimizes by moving everything to the other end and then selectively I suppose appropriately moves everything back to the front. Produces a "nice" everything together and no gaps, but didn't change my 6 min backup speed(to sata SSD).

[kris455]

Nor did booting to the recovery stick, though I realized that the total time shown in windows includes the time while it is waiting to get a lock before it starts. I need to remember to take that into account!

[kris455]

Essentially it would cost me ~1200 to build a box with a mobo (Z790 chipset) with 3 m.2 slots (one to boot, one to backup, and one to copy off-site stick) just to get faster (possibly) backup speeds. I am now getting 6 min which is much faster than old Macrium used to give me, It would be a fun toy, but...........