TeraByte Unlimited

I've used both IFD and IFL (latest non GUI versions) to image about 200 gigs of data on a 320 gig hard drive to an external USB hard drive with a byte for byte validation. The IFL program indicated that it would take 6+ hours to complete. I cancelled the backup and tried it with IFD and got an indicated time of 4+ hours to complete. I cancelled that as well.

I can't imagine why there should be such a large difference in backup times, and both these times seem excessive to me. I was wondering if others are experiencing similar backup times with these programs. The source drive is in a fairly new Dell XPS Laptop with a 2.0 USB port and the external drive is a Western Digital My Book.

I really like both these programs, and I have been looking for something that didn't have to run under Windows, but these time issues are a concern.

Jack Greenberg

AIUI, IfD uses the BIOS to access the drives and IfL does not (it
accesses them directly).

Backing up to a USB drive will be slow and likely to be one of the
limiting factors.
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Cheers

DrT
______________________________
We may not be able to prevent the stormy times in
our lives; but we can always choose to dance
in the puddles (Jewish proverb).

Thanks DrT. Regarding your statement about backing up to a USB drive, I assume you're referring to the interface and not the fact that it's an external hard drive, i.e. the USB connection rather than eSATA or Firewire. Unfortunately, I don't have an eSATA output on the computer and I haven't found any significant difference between USB 2.0 and Firewire. What kind of setup are you using that gives you better results timewise?

Jack

I use a quad channel USB/eSATA flash device for my backups. The device is capable of 30 or 110MB/s, depending on the interface used.

I've found that under a Windows environment, IFW will backup and restore to USB at the full rate, typically 25-30MB/s.
Using IFD from BIBM, typical backup and restore speeds are more like 6-7MB/s.

I assume this is windows having a more efficient device driver.

AFAIK, windows does not use the BIOS to access the drive. Some BIOSs are faster than direct access and some are slower.

DrT

On Tue, 5 Jun 2012 09:18:31 PDT, just as I was about to take a herb,
jack450 disturbed my reverie and wrote:

>Thanks DrT. Regarding your statement about backing up to a USB drive, I assume you're referring to the interface and not the fact that it's an external hard drive,

It's both, sorry for not being clear. I backup my whole network to one
hard disk in my main PC and them mirror the backups to an external USB2
hard disk using "Free File Sync".

--

Cheers

DrT
______________________________
We may not be able to prevent the stormy times in
our lives; but we can always choose to dance
in the puddles (Jewish proverb).