fastest clone?

[jaked.902]

Looking for some advice for the quickest possible backup scenario:

I provide mac support, and prefer to clone every and any drive before I work on it. I have many external drives, usb / IEEE 1394 a/b, ide and sata, and have recently acquired an esata capable drive - the WD myBook Studio 2. My intention purchasing this drive was to decrease the amount of time spent on a call backing up before getting down to business. Many times the client is not interested in waiting for this process to complete, and it has become awkward on several occasions when the cloning process has failed after significant (lengthy) progress.

So, I tested this WD drive on all four of it's connections - usb, fw400, fw800 and esata, with the drive configured to raid 0. I cloned a G4 emac hooked up in target mode through a 2.6 Ghz MacBook pro with a 7200 rpm hitachi drive inside to the WD mybook. What has surprised me is that fw800 is faster than esata writing to this drive. The fastest read/write speed I have seen via activity monitor is 40 MB/s, which is pretty much what I get to my LaCie d2 (not raid 0) via fw800.

So I'm wondering if anyone can tell me where the bottleneck might be occurring, or is this the limitation of the drives, and any advice on the fastest way to clone a drive without removing it form the machine, with portable gear.

Thanks!

Jake

[dnanian]

In general, copy a lot of small files doesn't max out most interfaces. I'm a bit surprised that FW800 outperforms eSATA -- I would expect them to be about the same... but, the vagaries of the implementations on both sides are probably responsible for the differences: certainly FW800 has been around longer.

[fishmonkey]

i haven't used Carbon Copy Cloner for a while, but it would be worth testing it to see if you can get a significantly faster clone using block-level copying...

as far as i am aware, SuperDuper! always does file-level clones...

[harryb2448]

Something even more surprising.

FW400 backs up system and all files faster than eSATA. Smart Backup takes 11 minutes on FW400, 17 minutes using an eSATA drive.

I wonder why?

[fishmonkey]

what kind of test did you do?

did you back up two identical source volumes onto two identical copies of the destination volume?