TeraByte Unlimited

I'm using IFW 3.64 in Windows 11 24H2 and restored a non-system partition for the first time in the many years I've been using the software. I suspended all my Bitlockered drives before booting into TBWinRE via USB stick, as usual, so that my unencrypted images would be encrypted on the fly during the restore. All my system partition restores have gone very quickly, and this restore of a single non-system partition started out fine. The image is hosted on a SATA SSD, and the restore was to a 1 TB NVME drive, both on the same system, so no networking involved. I saw it was doing like 400 MBps and walked away, figuring the 200 GB it had to restore would be over in a few minutes. When I came back, I saw IFW was estimating 40 minutes to restore, and the graph was showing 15-30 MBps, with brief bursts to 150 MBps every 10 seconds. The backup was an incremental depending on 4 previous backups, but this is nothing unusual for me; I've restored from the same SATA SSD to the primary NVME system drive on this same system, and it completed very quickly. I've since done a Validate inside my normal Windows 11 session, and it went quickly, bouncing between 150 and 450 MBps over the entire process and was over in 9 minutes. That was what I was expecting from the restore, but it ended up taking like 45 minutes. The restore did complete successfully, but if it had been a larger amount of data, the hours it would have taken could have really messed up my day.

Any ideas why this restore took so long? I did a "Normal" restore and used default options as I always do.

As in other similar cases, the critical factor may be the cache in the NVMe drive. When this cache fills up, the writing is effectively done directly to the SSD, which is slow.

My primary NVME drive is a WD Black, which is better than the secondary, a WD Blue. As a test, I copied three 22 GB files from the Black to the Blue using Windows 11 File Explorer, and the steady state was 800 MBps or so, just watching the graph. The copy operation was over in 70 sec, which works out to 942 MBps. The 15-30 MBps I observed in my IFW restore is pathologically slow in comparison, and I cannot replicate it inside my normal Windows 11 session. I guess I should try the file copy experiment within TBWInRE when I get the chance to see if there's something different about that environment WRT the Blue, but again, restores to the Black have all gone quickly in TBWinRE.

crawfish wrote: Sun Feb 16, 2025 11:12 pm I guess I should try the file copy experiment within TBWInRE when I get the chance to see if there's something different about that environment WRT the Blue, but again, restores to the Black have all gone quickly in TBWinRE.

I just tried copying 90 GB of data from the SATA backup SSD to the NVME WD Blue using cmd.exe in TBWinRE, and it went at 500 MBps. I also tried validating the backup using IFW, and it completed at a similar speed. These operations were way, way faster than the 15-30 MBps restore operation.

Has anybody else experienced unexpectedly slow restore operations in TBWinRE?