15 replies to this topic

[amenditman]

I just did my first Clone of a hard drive on a USB 3 port and external USB 3 hard drive.

Have to say it is my new favorite thing.

Used to be that during cloning to an external hdd over USB (2) I could get 60 - 90 Mb/s transfer speeds as reported by the Clonezilla progress monitor. It was an all day project to do a clone image.

I just set up a new laptop with Windows7 and ArchLinux on a solid state drive and wanted to make a clone on the fresh install.
Clonezilla's internal progress monitor reported 2.19 Gb/s transfer speed. 25 minutes and done.

I love USB 3.

[LilBambi]

Between the SSD drive and the true USB port and USB 3.0 external drive, I bet it was your favorite thing!

[sunrat]

USB2 could come close to maximum on a standard hard drive, but SSDs can be around ten times that, so USB3 would be a perfect match. I love the speed of my SSD main drive in my desktop, so you must be rapt to have an external one. They are still a bit expensive for mass backups, but prices falling all the time. I can get a similar 120GB one for half the price now than when I got it 18 months ago.

[amenditman]

I got my external from Newegg on a daily deal in Aug 2011.

Western Digital 2.5" 1TB USB3  $90 with free shipping.

[crp]

sunrat, on 29 July 2012 - 09:28 PM, said:

USB2 could come close to maximum on a standard hard drive, but SSDs can be around ten times that, so USB3 would be a perfect match. I love the speed of my SSD main drive in my desktop, so you must be rapt to have an external one. They are still a bit expensive for mass backups, but prices falling all the time. I can get a similar 120GB one for half the price now than when I got it 18 months ago.

What hard drive are you using that is so slow that USB2 can come close to matching?

[sunrat]

crp, on 30 July 2012 - 03:36 AM, said:

What hard drive are you using that is so slow that USB2 can come close to matching?

It's my theoretical hard drive. The USB2 spec is 480Mb/s for hi-speed, which theoretically would give a max throughput of 60MB/s, a reasonable speed for a HD. However in real world tests (after a bit of searching) it would be lucky to do 30MB/s.
I do have a WD Black 1TB HD in an eSATA enclosure which IIRC writes at over 60MB/s. I know some specs and tests will show some drives to be faster like WD Velociraptor at over 200MB/s, but I'm talking real world copying of thousands of music files.

@amenditman - what drives were you reading from/writing to for 2.19 Gb/s transfer speed?

[amenditman]

Internal drive was my Crucial m4 SSD (SATA III) and the external was my WD described above (post #4).

[burninbush]

amenditman, on 30 July 2012 - 12:42 PM, said:

Internal drive was my Crucial m4 SSD (SATA III) and the external was my WD described above (post #4).

Just to be clear, isn't that 2.19 giga =bits= per second?  If so, still a very fast rate.

[amenditman]

That's what the Clonezilla progress meter was reporting.
And it was really fast compared to the past when I was cloning from hdd to hdd over eSATA.

Edited by amenditman, 31 July 2012 - 02:40 AM.

[sunrat]

burninbush, on 30 July 2012 - 11:24 PM, said:

Just to be clear, isn't that 2.19 giga =bits= per second?  If so, still a very fast rate.

That's what I thought and is why I asked. It couldn't possibly be write speed to a hard drive. The Crucial m4 SSD has a maximum read speed of 500 MB/s so it would be possible to copy that fast to cache or RAM.

[amenditman]

Just looked up SATA II, SATA III, and USB3 specs on wikipedia.

SATA II

Quote

the maximum uncoded transfer rate is 2.4 Gbit/s (300 MB/s)

SATA III  

Quote

provides peak throughput of about 600 MB/s (Megabytes per second)

USB3

Quote

The "SuperSpeed" bus provides a transfer mode at 5.0 Gbit/s additionally to the three existing transfer modes. The raw throughput is 4 Gbit/s, and the specification considers it reasonable to achieve 3.2 Gbit/s (0.4 GB/s or 400 MB/s) or more.

So using SATA III/USB3 and acheiving 2.19 Gb/s (280.32 MB/s) seems well below theoretical maximums. This is about what I would expect based upon previous transfer standards theoretical vs. real performance.

[ross549]

Consider this when you think about a USB hard drive. You have the following

Hard drive <-> Interface card <-> USB interface <-> PCI bus or southbridge <-> SATA inteface <-> Internal hard drive

Like any chain, it can only go as fast as the weakest link. The weakest link used to be the USB bus, but that is now gone with USB3. USB 2 elminated it to a large extent.

Now, the slowest interface is typically going to be the hard drive interface inside the USB drive. Yeah, I know, everyone is saying it is SATA and should be fast. that is not the interface I am referring to. I am talking about the chip that bridges the SATA data to the USB bus. That is going to be the slower part, especially on cheap drives. If that is not the case, then the hard drive itself (which will do maybe 50/60MB per second for a spinning drive) will be the limiting factor.

Just because you have USB3 does not necessarily mean you will see improved performance from the hard drive.

Adam

[amenditman]

And here I was thinking that 280 MB/s was really good because on USB2 you were lucky to get 60 MB/s.

[ross549]

It is always good to remove a bottleneck....

Adam

[sunrat]

None of this explains what Clonezilla's reported speed actually means.

[crp]

sunrat, on 31 July 2012 - 09:14 PM, said:

None of this explains what Clonezilla's reported speed actually means.

does CloneZilla actually clone? Maybe it is effective speed of the backup if the destination file is already there. Report Cheating , but would reflect actual time of use/left.