# Hi-speed drive copy options?



## jgkurz (Feb 4, 2005)

Hi Folks,

I would like to copy a 1TB external drive and all recordings to a separate 1TB drive. I know this sounds strange but there is a good reason that I'll explain later. Both drives are perfect with no bad sectors. I started the copy using dd-rescue but I was averaging about 3MB/s. This was with both drives hooked up via SATA connections on the motherboard. For a TB drive this would take days to complete. I thought performance might improve if I put one drive on SATA and one on USB 2.0 but still only a slight improvement. My PC isn't a powerhouse with a 3400+ AMD and 1GB RAM but it should transfer faster than 3MB/s. I do have DMA enabled.

Questions:
1) Is the slow transfer speed a result of very small block sizes used on the Tivo format?

2) If the drives are healthy, could I use another tool to improve transfer speed?

3) Have any of you gotten much better transfer speeds with dd_rescue?

Thank you,
John


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## weaknees (May 11, 2001)

Actually, the direct SATA copy should be the fastest.

Have you tried manually specifying larger block sizes? For most version of dd_rescue you add a flag like "bs=10M".


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

jgkurz said:


> Both drives are perfect with no bad sectors. I started the copy using dd-rescue but I was averaging about 3MB/s. This was with both drives hooked up via SATA connections on the motherboard. For a TB drive this would take days to complete. I thought performance might improve if I put one drive on SATA and one on USB 2.0 but still only a slight improvement.


Check your SATA hardware, There should not of been any improvement USB speed is slower then SATA2 or 3.



jgkurz said:


> My PC isn't a powerhouse with a 3400+ AMD and 1GB RAM but it should transfer faster than 3MB/s. I do have DMA enabled.


 Are you bragging? The hardware should be way more then sufficient. However some of the MSFTool CDs have been known to have problems with the AMD processors.



jgkurz said:


> Questions:
> 1) Is the slow transfer speed a result of very small block sizes used on the Tivo format?


 No, TiVo uses large blocks and a binay copy should copy sector by sector anyway.



jgkurz said:


> 2) If the drives are healthy, could I use another tool to improve transfer speed?


 Any program that can do binary copy of the drives should work. I used Acronis True Image when I copied the noisy 750G (internal) drive to a replacement that took about 6 hours on my 450MHZ Intel PC with 512MB RAM. I do not have an external drive yet.



jgkurz said:


> 3) Have any of you gotten much better transfer speeds with dd_rescue?


 I have not tried, There should be some better tools the ones I prefer show the status of the transfer in progress.



jgkurz said:


> I would like to copy a 1TB external drive and all recordings to a separate 1TB drive. I know this sounds strange but there is a good reason that I'll explain later.


 Old drive noisy?


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## jgkurz (Feb 4, 2005)

weaknees said:


> Actually, the direct SATA copy should be the fastest.
> 
> Have you tried manually specifying larger block sizes? For most version of dd_rescue you add a flag like "bs=10M".


I'll give that a try. Thanks for the response.


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## jgkurz (Feb 4, 2005)

HomeUser said:


> Check your SATA hardware, There should not of been any improvement USB speed is slower then SATA2 or 3.
> 
> Are you bragging? The hardware should be way more then sufficient. However some of the MSFTool CDs have been known to have problems with the AMD processors.
> 
> ...


I agree the SATA should be faster. I will check my hardware. The Acronis is a great idea. I own it so I'll give it a try. My AMD is a model 3400+ which is about 2GHZ so no bragging here. The 1TB drive with the recording is a WD My Book drive that powers off randomly (as designed but BAD for Tivo). I didn't do enough reading before I bought it and filled it with recordings. I can still return it after I get everything coped over. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

-John


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## jgkurz (Feb 4, 2005)

HomeUser said:


> Any program that can do binary copy of the drives should work. I used Acronis True Image when I copied the noisy 750G (internal) drive to a replacement that took about 6 hours on my 450MHZ Intel PC with 512MB RAM. I do not have an external drive yet.


Strike 1. I tried to clone my current external drive to a replacement drive using Acronis True Image 11. When I selected the source drive to be copied it said the drive was "unallocated" and that an empty drive could not be copied. Looks like Acronis does not see a file system on the drive. If Acronis has worked in the past then maybe something was changed in the latest version to make it now unusable. I'll be trying DD_Rescue next...


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

jgkurz said:


> Strike 1. I tried to clone my current external drive to a replacement drive using Acronis True Image 11. When I selected the source drive to be copied it said the drive was "unallocated" and that an empty drive could not be copied. Looks like Acronis does not see a file system on the drive. If Acronis has worked in the past then maybe something was changed in the latest version to make it now unusable. I'll be trying DD_Rescue next...


Do you see something like a sector by sector check box I think it was at the bottom of the screen?

Sorry, I can not check the screen, I just tried and the True Image 11 CD will not boot on my PC since I replaced the CD with a SATA DVD drive.


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## jgkurz (Feb 4, 2005)

HomeUser said:


> Do you see something like a sector by sector check box I think it was at the bottom of the screen?
> 
> Sorry, I can not check the screen, I just tried and the True Image 11 CD will not boot on my PC since I replaced the CD with a SATA DVD drive.


I would have used Acronis but I could not find the option to do sector by sector when cloning a drive. It is available when backing up a drive.

I was able to get dd_rescue to work at 65MB/s. To do this I had to direct connect the 1TB Hitachi Cinemastar drive to a SATA port on the motherboard and the My Book 1TB drive to the mother board through the eSATA cable. I had three problems initially. I first tried to use a PCI SATA card for source drive and the motherboard SATA port for destination. My thinking was that I would spread the I/O across controllers to hopefully gain more throughput. WRONG! Next I went into my motherboard BIOS and made sure DMA was enabled on all ports. I believe I had some wrong settings. The last issue was that I was trusting the "hdparm -d1 /dev/sdx" command. It would output "HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device" meaning that DMA was disabled. I finally decided to test the drives using "hdparm -tT /dev/sdx" and I was getting about 65MB/s so then determined that DMA was indeed enabled. BTW, I used the MFSlive Linux Boot CD. I also think the Knoppix boot CD would work.


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