Disk Clone sector-by-sector - Estimated time left: FOREVER
Hello everyone! Let me start off by telling this is my first post on the forum. I’m writing this post hoping to see an improved, more responsive user interface with more accurate information in future updates for Acronis Clone Disk and other tools that are shipped in the DiskWizard suite.
In a nutshell. When running Clone Disk in sector-by-sector mode I want to have correct estimated completion time presented to me and be able to monitor transfer speed in Mb/s. It would also be nice to have transfer speed displayed for the overall operation (since hitting on the Proceed button) and current transfer rate (taking into account last 30-60 seconds of run time).
As an owner of a few Seagate HDDs/SSDs, I'm using DiskWizard version 24.0.28500 that is specifically licensed for users of Seagate products’ users.This version is currently the latest available as of 11/09/2020. The system is a smoothly running laptop with Win 10 Pro on i7 processor 8Gb RAM and Seagate SSD with plenty of free space (over 400Gb).
I needed to clone one HDD from a 2-bay Synology unit that was running on a single disk (not a RAID) to another HDD of the same capacity. Cloning disk drives, when done by a professional using a professional tool, is a pretty straight forward job and one thing about this kind of job is when you have two perfectly healthy drives it should be very predictable in terms of results and timing.
The source drive is 4TB Seagate Exos is a young, healthy and very fast HDD for its kind doing 200-210Mb/s read/write. The target drive is 4TB Toshiba N300 is young and healthy showing 140-150Mb/s read/write. Both hooked to my laptop on separate USB 3.0 ports apparently sitting in separate enclosures. Prior to the start of cloning both drives passed the SMART long self-tests.
After I selected the source drive in Clone Disk I was appropriately advised by Clone Disk that the drive contained unsupported partitions (ext4 and other Synology legacy) and therefore cloning would be done in sector-by-sector mode (and I needed sector-by-sector mode anyway). Then I selected my target drive. Then I selected the “As Is” option for partition resizing (none needed). Then I pressed the Proceed button. Disk Clone took its time to calculate estimated completion time, about 20-30 minutes and then announced it would take 9 hours and 7 minutes for the operation to complete.
When I came back to the desk 10 hours later I found Disk Clone still running stage “5 of 6 - Copying and merging partitions” and showing “Estimated time left : less than 1 minute” and both enclosures happily flashing their LEDs indicating I/O operations and both drives warm to touch - all still looked good. I said - great, it’s about time.
Seven and a half hours later Disk Clone did not change its option about estimated time left and was still showing all the same info and both drives appeared the same busy doing some I/O operations.
Given the size of HDDs and time that have passed since the beginning of the procedure, if it was to complete at this minute the transfer speed would be 62Mb/second.
Luckily for me I did not need to move my laptop around this day as it remained chained to my desk running Disk Clone. Also, I did not break any promises about delivering the HDDs or anything else in connection with the HDD maintenance (cloning).
Question 1. I think it is fair to expect more or less accurate Estimated Completion Time for a straight forward sector-by-sector copy job for perfect source and target media? Especially when giants as Seagate and WD trust Acronis to serve their customers.
Question 2. Has anyone timed Acronis Disk Clone when doing sector-by-sector cloning - what transfer speed should be expected?
Just as fun part, let’s make bets whether or not Synology accepts the new HDD and goes on without issues after the cloning procedure is done (hopefully).
Update 1: it has been 24 hours since the start of cloning operation; Disk Clone still shows the same message as 14 hours ago - "less than 1 minute left"; both drives appear very busy and warm/hot to the touch.
Update 2: it has been 36 hours since the start of cloning operation and 26 hours since Disk Clone started showing - "less than 1 minute left"; both drives appear very busy and warm/hot to the touch. If the cloning was to complete this minute the transfer speed would be 30Mb/second.
Update 3: it has been 41 hours since the start of cloning operation and 31 hours since Disk Clone started showing - "less than 1 minute left"; both drives appear very busy and warm/hot to the touch. If the cloning was to complete this minute the transfer speed would be 26.5Mb/second.
Update 4: it has been 58 hours since the start of cloning operation and 48 hours since Disk Clone started showing - "less than 1 minute left"; both drives appear very busy and warm/hot to the touch. If the cloning was to complete this minute the transfer speed would be 18.7Mb/second.
Cheers,
Oleg S.
To swap Seagate Exos with Toshiba N300 in my old Synology unit, because I have identical Seagate Exos and they will be used in RAID in another unit.
My 2-bay Synology lost its internal SATA port #1 due to unknown malfunction. The other port SATA #2 is functioning normally. When I troubleshooted the unit 10 month ago I was going to put two new 2x Seagate Exos in it (the drive that was in dead SATA #1 also died). All attempts to recover SATA #1 failed and apparently this kind of issue can happen in Synology units - I read many reports from other users having it.
Since I found that SATA #1 is dead forever, Synology has been running on single Seagate Exos HDD (non RAID) with external HDD hooked to it where all data was rsynced daily.
So I had a hope to get the cloning done overnight (original 9 hours 7 minutes estimate) and toss the new N300 to Synology in the morning. At this time, after 36 hours since the begin of sector-by-sector cloning I know I would have been done yesterday if I simply setup Synology on new N300 from scratch and then restored DSM settings and then all files from the backup HDD.
I'm betting that Synology will not notice a thing when I put new cloned N300 in. Or may be a thing or two, but it will run. After all, this is a full sector-by-sector cloning method when the program does not mess with the source drive's data.
I also hoped that Acronis Disk Cloning would be a head above GHost in terms of everything. I might try to use it after all if Acronis Clone Disk fails.
Oleg, Acronis True Image is primarily a Windows application and intended to work with native Windows filesystems rather than with those from Linux based systems such as your Synology NAS.
There have been other users trying to do similar cloning exercises with Synology NAS drives who also reported problems.
If your intention here is to take a working Seagate NAS drive and move this to another Seagate NAS, then assuming that the new NAS would accept the Seagate NAS 'as is' then it might be quicker and simpler to use the facilities provided by the Synology DSM OS to be able to rebuild the RAID array using the Toshiba N300 drive as the second NAS drive, as would be done in the case of a single drive failure with a 2 drive NAS.
See Synology webpage document: Replace Drives to Expand Storage Capacity
The alternatives here would be to either use a dual-bay cloning dock station that would perform a bit for bit hardware clone of the source drive to the target drive, or else to use a clone application that is designed to work with the range of Linux filesystems such as Clonezilla.
Note: the dual-bay hardware cloning dock would normally require that the target drive be of the same or larger size than the source drive, so you would need to confirm that the two 4TB drives are actually of the same size!
Steve, thank you for mentioning the alternatives ways for cloning HDDs. But I chose to use Clone Disk because it was available for me immediately and I don't do cloning often so there is no need in hardware HDD dubbing station.
For Disk Clone being primarily a Windows platform targeted software - it should be irrelevant because sector-by-sector HDD copying should be OS-independent and partition-independent procedure.
The really big issue I'm having with Disk Clone is low transfer speed and not a single way to monitor the progress or to know estimated time left.
This could have been a hell of a solution if it was added to Clone Disk: It would be nice to have transfer speed displayed for the overall operation (since hitting on the Proceed button) and current transfer rate (taking into account last 30-60 seconds of run time).
Question: Does Disk Clone produce any kind of log in Windows Log or a local log file when running any processes? How do Acronis software engineers track down milestones of a running process when troubleshooting their software?
For Disk Clone being primarily a Windows platform targeted software - it should be irrelevant because sector-by-sector HDD copying should be OS-independent and partition-independent procedure.
It should be irrelevant but Acronis sometimes tries to be a little too clever! It may try to make the cloned target drive bootable for the system where the cloning is performed and may try to inject device drivers by using Acronis Universal Restore. For Windows disks, there are lots of forum complaints about drives being converted to either UEFI from MBR or from MBR to UEFI to match the partition scheme of the system cloning is run on!
I have never attempted to use ATI to clone any Linux based drives nor the drives from my own Synology NAS.
Question: Does Disk Clone produce any kind of log in Windows Log or a local log file when running any processes? How do Acronis software engineers track down milestones of a running process when troubleshooting their software?
There are log files created by ATI for all operations including cloning. For this you should download the MVP Assistant tool from the Acronis Community Tools KB page - this is a standalone tool with no installation needed. You should check the Backup Worker and / or the Demon log files in the log tool to look for the log file created by the clone operation.
There is no published information available to users about the design or internals of the application.
At this point I am wondering if this experience I am having and currently sharing is going to be breaking news for the developers team. I am certainly hoping for this story to make appearance in one of their weekly meetings.
Steve, it appears from what you are sharing is that there is a lot of uncertainty in how Clone Disk functions. I actually tried to search for a users guide or help file for Clone Disk but only found a few articles on how to do basic cloning. Certainly an area that needs more attention from Acronis product management.
Overall, I am surprised to find out the frivolous approach was used in Clone Disk software. In my opinion (I should have said undisputably), all the functions advertised in DiskWizard suite are mission-critical and life-critical, these are not some apps or games. All must be at top-notch level - from bullet-proof system layer to the responsive informative GUI to clearly written user manual. No point adding new features and rolling out new versions if core functions are not working reliably.
On a related note, it has been 39 hours since the start of cloning operation and 29 hours since Disk Clone started showing - "less than 1 minute left"; both drives appear very busy and warm/hot to the touch. If the cloning was to complete this minute the transfer speed would be 27.8Mb/second.
Reliability of the Cloning Function is the reason that I No Longer attempt to use the cloning function. I did try it a few times and the results were not good so I dropped back to the proven reliability of the disk or partition Backup/Restore option.
I just examined both MVP Assistant and MVP Log Viewer tools. Log Viewer did not show any additional logs that MVP Assistant did not have. There are no Demon or BackupWorker logs shown in either of the tools. I attached a snapshot of all logs that have been produced by Acronis as shown in MVP Assistant.
I have searched entire content of C:\ProgramData\Acronis folder for any references to the cloning process and found none (recursive search for all *.* files containing "clon" keyword using proven tools).
When manually examining text files (Acronis logs are easy to read plain text files) I found a few SnapAPI logs likely related to Clone Disk application - one for DiskWizardTool.exe process (this is the one that starts Clone Disk wizard when launched with /clone_disk switch). Also found another SnapAPI log file for DiskWizardService.exe which is possibly the background running service executing disk cloning operation.
Note that it is 2020-11-10 23:27 UTC here right now, but none of the above log files contain any log line dated 2020-11-10.
There is also no any log files dated 2020-11-10 within C:\ProgramData\Acronis.
Question. Where else can I look to learn the state of the cloning process? Is there anything can be done to know that Clone Disk is actually making progress and not running in an infinite loop due to XYZ-reason that can never-ever happen in the mind of some coders?
Oleg, the log tools are written for the full ATI versions, in particular for ATI 2020 and later which introduced new logs that the old log viewer didn't know about. Unfortunately, there are various OEM versions of ATI such as Seagate DiscWizard which have been modified by the vendor, i.e. Seagate, and which may not follow the same log processes.
See KB 2201: Support for OEM Versions of Acronis Products which applies to all OEM versions of ATI supplied with hardware purchases.
Steve, thank you for mentioning vendor-specific support page. I will certainly explore it and make Seagate aware about the cloning issue.
I seriously doubt that anyone at Seagate modified any of the core functions of DiskWizard. Vendor adaptation would only include re-labeling of the product brand and adding licensing-specific procedures like detecting vendor manufactured equipment - HDD, SSD etc.
The issue I am having is with Clone Disk core function - running sector-by-sector cloning.
For the record. It has been 58 hours since the start of cloning operation and 48 hours since Disk Clone started showing - "less than 1 minute left"; both drives appear very busy and warm/hot to the touch. If the cloning was to complete this minute the transfer speed would be 18.7Mb/second.
It looks like Clone Disk took me back to 90's with blazing data transfer speeds around 20Mb/s.
At this point I am now worrying about the health of the drives due to possibility of Clone Disk running in an infinite loop and wearing out a set of sectors on both drives by repeatedly doing the same I/O of them.
So the Question remains: What transfer speed should be expected when doing sector-by-sector disk cloning?
20Mb/s I am currently measuring on this cloning operation is absurd and how much longer should I wait before terminating the process?
Oleg, sorry but it is impossible for me or the other MVP's to say what transfer speed should be expected for cloning your 4TB drives as each user scenario will have subtle differences.
Personally, I very rarely use cloning and have never cloned a drive greater than around 200GB that I can remember. I prefer to make a full disk backup of the source drive, then remove that drive before doing a recovery of the backup archive to a second drive.
One recent backup of a failing 250GB drive using sector-by-sector method took over 12 hours to finish - this due to a lot of bad sectors, error retries etc, and was left to run overnight while I slept. It was 'done' when I got up the next day, then it took a similar time to recover that backup to a new, larger drive that I was later able to spend time repairing via CHKDSK, SFC etc before repeating the process to recover back to a new smaller SSD (for a laptop).
I would not expect any clone operation of non-failing drives to take more than a few hours for most standard drive sizes, and not more than 6 to 10 hours for your 4TB drives, so the clone taking around 60 hours signals either the clone failing, looping or an issue with dealing with the non-Windows file systems involved.
Your concern about the health of the drives is valid in this scenario and one reason why I use Backup instead of Clone, as the original drive is put safely aside after the backup is created.
Oleg, have you checked the Windows event viewer to see if there are any reported errors there?
Have you been able to run a S.M.A.R.T. check on the drives involved (after the long clone process)?
Looking another way, I just went back to the original post and see that you are cloning a 4TB drive to another 4TB drive with both drives USB 3.0 ports. I math'd it using a USB 3.0 transfer rate of 625 MB/s. Dividing 4TB by 625MB tells me that considering the USB ports as the speed limiter and assuming they get maxed out, the job probably would not run less than 2 hours. Given the 60 hours so far, and that it is stuck on step five of 6, I would not be assuming it would ever complete.
Steve, Bruno - thank you for providing additional considerations for this forever running cloning process.
I terminated the process once it passed 60 hours mark by clicking on the Cancel button on the Clone Disk progress dialog. The dialog immediately responded and after confirmation the process was stopped. There were no any errors or otherwise bizarre behavior on Clone Disk side after the process was cancelled.
I examined content of the Logs folder and found two logs with up to date (up to the minute) log entries both showing at the end that the processes exited on its own: DiskWizardService.exe and DiskWizard.exe. I have attached the logs here - I am hoping someone from the dev team will have a chance to look at them. The three SnapAPI logs attached here are for DiskWizardTools.exe, DiskWizardService.exe and DiskWizard.exe - processes that were involved in this cloning operation. I will gladly provide any additional details should it be requested by someone from Acronis investigating the issue.
For the source and target HDDs health - they seems ok. I hooked the source drive back to Synology to check its state - and it is running well so far. I will attach a snapshot of how the partitions look on both HDDs after the 60-hour cloning operation was cancelled.
For the solution - Clone Disk needs review of its sector-by-sector cloning routine. Also, the logs produced by a running process need some improvements to provide practical insight into the progress of the process. Sectors can be addressed and can be numbered and can be counted and transfer speed can be calculated and all this can be dumped into logs etc, etc.
P.S. File Upload function on this forum did not let me upload the log file as is showing error "The file could not be uploaded.". The log file I attempted to upload is 476Kb in size and has "log" extension - "SnapAPI-20201109-071045-029.0.log". Also, it didn't let me upload a zipped file at 64Kb named "SnapAPI.zip" throwing the same error. I'm looking right now for another way to share logs.
Oleg, glad that the clone appears to have worked for you despite having not come to an obvious successful completion status!
These are purely user forums with no direct involvement by any Acronis developers, and as indicated previously, any support for OEM versions of ATI has to come from the OEM company, i.e. Seagate in this case. The OEM company should have their own contact methods for dealing with the Acronis development teams.
The issue with using the File Upload feature of the forums has been reported repeatedly to Acronis in forum topic: Feedback on Acronis Forum but has not been resolved!!!
Steve, the clone actually did not complete successfully. The HDD I put in Synology unit for a check after cloning cancel was the original source HDD. I'm just glad that the source HDD seems healthy and not corrupted. The target HDD appear healthy but it is only partially cloned. I have attached screen snapshots here for review.
In the Disk Management partition view after 60-hours cloning operation cancelled :
Disk 1 - is the original source HDD Seagate Exos 4Tb
Disk 3 - is the original target HDD Toshiba N300 4Tb
In the Clone Disk partition view after 60-hour cloning operation cancelled :
Disk 2 - is the original source HDD Seagate Exos 4Tb
Disk 4 - is the original target HDD Toshiba N300 4Tb
I managed to upload the zipped logs to the File Manager normally used for inserting picture files in posts. The file manager didn't let me to insert the attachment inline with the comment text but the zip file is there in my user folder \user338009 and named "SnapAPI_*.zip_".
I would agree with BrunoC here on the time aspect of this thread.
The best way to perform a clone of a disk is to perform the operation using the recovery media version of True Image. Using the clone tool in the Windows application is designed to perform what can be called a "live" clone of a Windows OS disk.
The recovery media will perform a sector by sector or (bit by bit) clone of one drive to another much more readily and is designed to support this type of clone operation whereas the Windows installed version is not. It can be done using the Windows installed version but again, the tool is designed to do so on Windows based disks.
Since you have an OEM version of the product you should be looking for a way to make removable media (either CD or flash drive) that contains the True Image application and is booted on your laptop and then used to clone the drives which will remove Windows from this picture entirely. If you see a Tools section in the OEM software look for Media Builder there. If found that utility can be used to create removable media which can then be used to clone your disks.
Following is a link to cloning disks. In the link please refer to the section "Cloning from Acronis Bootable Media" for instructions on using removable media to perform a clone.
Well, one would need a lot of swap space to clone 4Tb HDDs using backup and restore method. In my case sector-by-sector cloning is only method due to source HDD containing ext4 partitions.
You realize that backing it up would need 4Tb space. I don't have this much space, most users would not. Now lets talk about cloning HDDs twice the size etc.
After all Clone Disk is essentially dedicated to cloning disks, HDDs, SSDs. It simply does not work apparently in some scenarios and does not provide users with appropriate information about the state of its running operations.
I have used bootable media created by Rescue Media Builder from DiskWizard but have not used it for disk cloning. This would be an option if I did not need my PC/laptop available for doing normal work. Because nobody would want to chain their PC while booted from rescue media only to clone an HDD. With 10Tb HDDs and above you are looking for a lot of time thrown out if cloning from the rescue bootable media is only option.
Clone Disk must work as advertised in any supported environment. If Clone Disk sees a roadblock - there must be a message shown to the user.
I would think that you should be able to run a clone task on your disks in a relative speedy manner. Although your disks are 4TB in size they probably contain less data then that. The space where data is contained will be the slowest part of the operation. Areas on disk that do not contain data will process much faster. I would estimate around 1 hour per TB personally.
The big problem you faced attempting this in Windows is as I described. Running clone from bootable media is the recommended method in all cases and this is especially true on non Windows disks.
Again, let me make emphasis on the fact that the method of cloning used was sector-by-sector - it is when it does not matter what content there is on entire HDD.
From standpoint of sector-by-sector cloning there are no empty or non-empty sectors. There are no "data containing sectors" and "non data containing sectors". Each and every sector contains data that must be copied from standpoint of sector-by-sector cloning. Whatever stored on a sector in the source drive must be copied to the sector on the target drive. What other words to use to explain it? I hope it also becomes very clear that when cloning a 4Tb drive using sector-by-sector method entire content of the drive must be copied - there is nothing to skip.
Number of sectors to copy and special service data areas to copy - all that matters - and copying all of that must be a straight-forward dumb process.
All these attempts to sway away from discussion of non functioning sector-by-sector cloning are becoming pretty tiring.
In the end of the day I would rather prefer a message from Clone Disk stating something like "oh-ohh... there is ext4 partitions on the source disk. I can only clone this disk using sector-by-sector mode and only when booted from recovery media". But Clone Disk said - "ok, it will take me 9 hours and 7 minutes" - and the rest of the story is described above.
Let's fasten seatbelts and try it again? This time with ATI 2020 WD Edition?
Any bets? What are the odds?
Well, one would need a lot of swap space to clone 4Tb HDDs using backup and restore method. In my case sector-by-sector cloning is only method due to source HDD containing ext4 partitions.
You realize that backing it up would need 4Tb space. I don't have this much space, most users would not. Now lets talk about cloning HDDs twice the size etc.
Potentially you would need another 4TB or larger HDD to store a backup image on assuming that no compression can be achieved when doing a sector-by-sector backup of the source drive. With compression, then there should be some small savings in space in the image.
The key benefit of using Backup is that data is only being transferred in or out on a single USB interface rather than having to read in source data on one USB port and write out again on the second.
One further issue that may be at play here is that your 2 x 4TB HDD's are not exactly the same size, which wouldn't normally be a problem with file systems not needing sector-by-sector, but is here! Your screen image from disk management shows that HDD 1 is 3726.02 GB but that HDD 3 is slightly smaller at 3725.90 GB where that slight difference can be the reason for this failing clone.
If you are consider using Acronis rescue media to try the cloning, then I would suggest trying Clonezilla boot media instead as this has full support for Linux filesystems and wouldn't need to use a sector-by-sector approach.
I'll bet that your attempt to use the WD edition of True Image from Windows will fail just like your first attempt.
True Image uses Microsoft's VSS service to create a snapshot of a disk from which to create the clone. That is going to be true whether no matter what. Using bootable media to clone will not use VSS. Additionally, using the Media Builder tool you can create a Linux boot media from which to boot the machine and run the clone which could give you an advantage here.
A clone is a bit for bit copy of a source disk to a target disk. At times, differences in disk size can be a problem however, because the app gets you as far as beginning the clone I think this is not the case. Generally disk size is an issue because of insufficient capacity of the target or a difference in logical sector size both of which will never allow the clone process to even start.
So, I let Clone Disk to have another midnight run and the outcome is the same - once Clone Disk hit the mark at which it displayed "less than 1 minute left" it stayed there for hours while still doing I/O on both HDDs. I think I let it run for total of 11 hours this time. I then cancelled it and the partition view on the target HDD looked the same incomplete as in the original 60-hour failed attempt.
The conclusion here is that Clone Disk does not know how to do sector-by-sector cloning and can easily lead the user into a dead-end. Maybe in some limited basic scenarios it can. But then it should recognize a scenario when cloning cannot be done and alert the user instead of blindly making a promise. And then, while leading the user into the dead-end Clone Disk keeps the user in total darkness, because there are no logs produced by TrueImageHomeService.exe executing cloning routing while cloning is being performed. Apparently, it keeps the log file updates in the memory and do not flush file buffers to disk so the logs do not update until after the cloning process is complete or cancelled. But even then, there is nothing in the log to make sense about the progress or failure of cloning procedure. No errors, no exceptions, basically TrueImageHomeService.exe thinks it was doing just fine.
I have been trying to make it clear that I needed to be able to clone a disk sector-by-sector while multitasking on my Windows 10 and not having to boot from another media simply to run a cloning process. Also, I did not want to use the backup/restore way for multiple reasons: one would need 10Tb swap space for doing it for 10Tb HDD because I hope we remember that there is no data to skip in sector-by-sector cloning. We the users very often do not have this much swap space. And the other reason - it would take about twice as much time.
So I see it's all fun and games for some software developers. Too bad for many of us Symantec acquired GHost and then killed it. GHost was the most robust HDD cloning software of its time.
My search for reliable disk cloning and partition management software is still going on...
Thanks all for your input and advice.
Quick follow up to clear up slight size discrepancy pointed out by Steve, as shown on one of my own snapshots of Windows Disk Management console view. It is essentially a puzzle for owners of Disk Management product that magically produced these numbers:
Disk 1: 3726.02 Gb for a 4Tb HDD Seagate Exos (correct size shown).
Disk 3: 3725.90 Gb for a 4Tb HDD Toshiba N300 (incorrect size shown).
From attached snapshot you can see that both drives have identical number of sectors - 7,814,037,168. Since both drives have the same native sector size of 512 bytes their actual capacity can be measured by multiplication of the two numbers above.
Therefore capacity of each drive is 4,000,787,030,016 bytes. That is conveniently translated by product marketers into 4Tb that is slapped on the HDD's retail label.
For the record, here is drive's actual capacity in different units (there is magic number 1024 involved):
4000787030016 Bytes
3907018584 Kb
3815447.836 Mb
3726.023277 Gb
3.638694607 Tb
Oleg, I just reread your initial post and am rethinking my timing comment in post #12.
First, you said that you are using the Seagate OEM version in DiskWIzard. Although you say it's the latest version from them, I have no idea how old it is from Acronis. Later you say you tried the WD OEM version which may be very similar to the Seagate OEM version.
I looked at the Seagate cloning support page and am wondering if you are running this OEM version under Windows or did you boot to DiskWizard? It is unclear to me if you can run the cloning under Windows. Also, the page notes in boldface "When performing a Clone on a desktop computer, it is recommended to have both drives attached directly to the SATA/PATA motherboard." Yes, I realize you are on a laptop but it is an interesting note. And finally, all the DiskWizard documentation is basically concerning copying the internal drive, not two externals. That may be irrelevant.
Anyway, back to the timing issue. But rather than using the USB 3.0 speeds, I now see the speeds you indicated in your initial post...
"The source drive is 4TB Seagate Exos is a young, healthy and very fast HDD for its kind doing 200-210Mb/s read/write. The target drive is 4TB Toshiba N300 is young and healthy showing 140-150Mb/s read/write. Both hooked to my laptop on separate USB 3.0 ports apparently sitting in separate enclosures. Prior to the start of cloning both drives passed the SMART long self-tests."
Back to the math... I take 4TB, which is 4,000,000 MB or 32,000,000 Mb. Dividing by your destination speed of 150 Mb/s translates to approximately 60 hours at best case. I don't know where you got your read/write speeds so I don't know how close to those speeds could be achieved. But, perhaps there was an end in sight. If your write speeds to the destination drive are accurate, you could try to boot into DiskWizard so as to avoid running under Windows and then let it run while you go on a short vacation.
Bruno, I am afraid you are terribly off in your calculations.
With transfer speed at 150Mb/s (this actually reads megabytes per second and 1 megabyte being 1024 * 1024 = 1048576 bytes) it takes little over 7 hours to move 3.638694607 Tb of actual data (based on 4Tb marketed = 4,000,000,000,000 bytes).
So your attempt to use WD software failed. I am not surprised at this.
You seem to insist that we do not understand your position here. Fact is we DO understand. The issue at had here is again the design of the software's intended use is NOT what you believe it should be.
Acronis recommends that clone operations be performed using the bootable media. The clone tool as it exists in Windows is designed for cloning Windows disks. That is bottom line here.
If you want to perform a clone in a different scenario (non Windows disk) then you need to do it with bootable media or else face failure.
olsaff III wrote:Bruno, I am afraid you are terribly off in your calculations.
With transfer speed at 150Mb/s (this actually reads megabytes per second and 1 megabyte being 1024 * 1024 = 1048576 bytes) it takes little over 7 hours to move 3.638694607 Tb of actual data (based on 4Tb marketed = 4,000,000,000,000 bytes).
I was going off what you wrote. MB means megabytes. Mb means megabits.
Oleg, the reality here is that ATI is not suited to the purpose that you need and that you need to use a different tool.
See the following post from the Synology forums where other users have wanted to do the same as you.
Blancpain wrote: Hi,
I upgraded my 115j today from 6TB WD Red to 8TB SG Ironwolf. The method ismquite fast, but you need the following:
- Dual hdd dock with cloning function and USB3, a computer, a gparted live stick or cd (free software).-first i took out the original hdd of the DS and put it in the source slot of the dock
-the new hdd goes in the target slot of the dock
-clone the disks by pushing the copy/clone button
-have a nice day out (cloning took 13h)
-take the original hdd out of the source slot and put it away until everything works
-connect the dock with the newly cloned hdd to the computer and boot gparted
-resize the data partition by moving the slider to the right, allocating the unallocated disk space
-enjoy :DPlease note: I had no success with other partition software than gparted
Worked like a charm! Copied a 2TB NAS drive (Seagate) to a 6TB NAS drive (WD Red) with an offline cloner. The process took 4 hours. I just had to set the partition table of the new 6TB drive to GPT instead of MBR because of the 2TB limitations.
Easier than ever used Gdisk within Gparted Live USB drive and then resized the data partition. Et voila, everything up and running as we speak.
Thanks so much for this tip. And it costs me 45 dollars:-)
See also the following webpages about tools designed to clone / copy Linux ext4 disks.
Webpage: Top 15 Best Disk Cloning Software for Linux in 2020
Enchantch wrote:
So your attempt to use WD software failed. I am not surprised at this.
Let's make it clear for everybody that Clone Disk was developed by Acronis. The ATI 2020 WD Edition just requires to have a WD drive installed in the system in order to run Acronis software - that’s all. None of the issues described here related in any way to WD software or Seagate software.
Acronis recommends that clone operations be performed using the bootable media. The clone tool as it exists in Windows is designed for cloning Windows disks. That is bottom line here.
Here is a picture below that speaks a thousand words (it is already posted above in case if you missed it). I can even quote the message from the picture so it easier to read:
"One or more partitions on the source drive contain an unsupported or missing file system, and can be cloned only in the sector-by-sector mode. Are you sure you want to continue cloning?"
How does this statement feels for you - "can be cloned only in the sector-by-sector mode"?
Perhaps Clone Disk should have produced a statement like the following : "One or more partitions on the source drive contain an unsupported or missing file system, and can not be cloned on running Windows 10 system. Please create a bootable media and use it to clone this disk."
If you want to perform a clone in a different scenario (non Windows disk) then you need to do it with bootable media or else face failure.
After the second cloning attempt described in the thread above failed I learned immediately that Clone Disk cannot do sector-by-sector cloning on a running Windows 10 system. Why to keep bringing it up? This might be painful to read for some people responsible for the operation of Clone Disk.
Steve wrote:
Oleg, the reality here is that ATI is not suited to the purpose that you need and that you need to use a different tool.
See the following post from the Synology forums where other users have wanted to do the same as you.
I realized that yesterday after the second cloning attempt failed using Clone Disk. I am currently trying another Windows based tool and will report back if it succeeds.
Thanks for the references!
Steve wrote:
Oleg, the reality here is that ATI is not suited to the purpose that you need and that you need to use a different tool.
See the following post from the Synology forums where other users have wanted to do the same as you.
I realized this after the second attempt cloning the disk with Clone Disk failed yesterday. I am currently trying another Windows-based tool to clone the disk as is on running Windows 10 system. I will report back if it succeeds.
Thanks for the references!
Okay, now that we have established that you understand performing the clone disk in your scenario in an offline mode, that fact is at the center of resolving your issue. If you absolutely must have your laptop available during the clone then you need to follow the advice of Steve in post #32 as is is your best option for getting the clone done while leaving your laptop free to use for other purposes.
As for your point that the Windows based clone tool cannot perform a sector by sector clone that is what I have been saying this entire time by telling you that to do this you need bootable media. What is suppose to happen in instances where an unsupported file system is found is that the software should tell you that a restart is required to perform the clone. That did not happen here so the question is why? I cannot speak for that as I nor anyone else here works for Acronis. This Forum is user based meaning that I and the other MVP's whom post here are users just like you are and we volunteer our time here to help other users with problems.
If you wish to report a feature of the application that you feel does not function correctly then you can do so by using the feedback tool found in the Help section of the application.
Today I finished cloning the drives using HDD Raw Copy Tool that uses sector-by-sector copying and does it properly. All done while running my Windows 10 system. No need to create bootable media, no need to restart your system, no need to lock down your PC just to clone a drive.
The target HDD Toshiba is plugged into my Synology and the unit is up and running with all components running smoothly just like it was on the original Seagate HDD.
Finally the solution is found.
Oleg, thanks for sharing the solution you have found with HDD Raw Copy Tool and great to know that this free tool was able to do the job successfully for you!
Steve, sure, I'm glad I'm over with this task and other people are going to know how it can be done online, on a running Windows system.
But I have to keep looking because the speed of 49Mb/s is not fun - it took total 22,5 hours. Not sure actually what is the top transfer speed that can be achieved when doing sector-by-sector cloning.
I’m also hoping to see in the future updated Clone Disk capable of doing sector-by sector cloning on a running Windows system.
P.S. Thanks for the references!