Rescue Media | Restore Disk Backup USB 3.0 speed | Clone Disk USB 2.0 speed
I have a USB 3.0 external HDD connected to the motherboard USB 3.0 port. I do disk backups of my C drive to the external HDD. When I restore a disk backup to my C drive from the external drive using the Rescue Media, it only takes about 20 mins with USB 3.0 speed.
I just attempted to Clone the C drive to a new SATA 3 SSD using a USB 3.0 docking station connected to the motherboard USB 3.0 port using the Rescue Media. I ended up cancelling the Clone because it was taking so long and it said it had hours to go, so I assume it must of been running at USB 2.0 speed, which makes sense because the USB 3.0 drivers get loaded when Windows boots. But if that's the case then why does restoring a disk backup of the C drive run at USB 3.0 speed?
I've tested Cloning from within the Windows environment (which reboots the PC to perform the clone), and also using Acronis True Image booted from a USB drive that was created using Universal Restore (6559) that contains Acronis True Image. I did not install Acronis True Image to the USB drive using the build 6595 Rescue Media creation tool.
I would suspect that all your rescue media is defaulting to using the older Linux kernel OS both when rebooting from within Windows, and creating USB media using either the rescue media builder tool or using AUR. The older linux media will have minimal support for any newer hardware such as USB 3.0 when compared to the support available in Windows.
Steve Smith wrote:I would suspect that all your rescue media is defaulting to using the older Linux kernel OS both when rebooting from within Windows, and creating USB media using either the rescue media builder tool or using AUR. The older linux media will have minimal support for any newer hardware such as USB 3.0 when compared to the support available in Windows.
That's my guess too. FYI, ATI 2016 supports Windows PE (built with Windows ADK) using the MVP rescue media builder.
MVP Tool - CUSTOM ATI WINPE BUILDER
Grab the current Windows 10 ADK from Microsoft (linked in my signature) and install it. It's big, but it's super nice to have the option to build this rescue media and other tools that create rescue media may rely on it too.
Then grab the MVP tool, put it on the root of an external drive or your C drive (not the drive you intend to make the rescue media on though - it will get wiped out in the process!!!). Then launch the tool with right-click and "run as administrator" to ensure full admin access.
This is a supported tool from Acronis and you'll see the sticky on the main forum page (linked above), as well as references on the side here >>>>>
and also on the community users KB article
Booting from the rescue media, and restoring a disk backup of the 250GB C drive, only takes about 20mins:
USB 3.0 External HDD (contains the disk backup) >>> Internal SATA III SSD C Drive = 20mins
Booting from the rescue media, and cloning the 250GB C drive, is really slow (maybe slower than USB 2.0?), after a few hours it had only cloned a tiny percent, and said it had 24hours plus to go.
Internal SATA III SSD C Drive >>> USB 3.0 Dock Station SATA III SSD = 24hours plus
Have also tried using different SSDs, USB 3.0 cables, USB 3.0 ports, and USB 3.0 dock stations.
I just realized you also have this other topic open regarding inability to restore certain backups from USB via forum http://forum.acronis.com/comment/506619#comment-506619
You may have more going on here than we can validate or track down in the forum since you have a couple of different issues, but could be related.
However, in general, cloning has more limitations than backup and restore. For me, cloning is roughly as fast as restore, but I usually restore anyway, since I take a backup before doing any clone operation (just in case). If the backup is already there, then there isn't much point in doing a clone when I can just restore the backup.
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https://kb.acronis.com/content/56634
Prerequisites
Source and target disks must have equal logical sector size. Cloning to a disk with different logical sector size is not supported. E.g., you can clone a 512 bytes/sector disk to 512 bytes/sector disk; you can clone a 4096 bytes/sector disk to 4096 bytes/sector disk; but you cannot clone a disk with logical sector size 512 bytes to disk with logical sector size 4096 bytes.
ShowClick here to learn how to check disk's sector size:
Only basic disks can be cloned with Acronis True Image. You cannot clone dynamic disks.
ShowChecking if you have basic or dynamic disks
Source disk volumes can be cloned to the target disk "as is" or resized proportionally. It is possible to clone a larger disk to a smaller one, provided that the smaller hard disk has enough capacity to fit the contents of the larger disk.
It is recommended that your old and new hard drives work in the same controller mode (for example, IDE or AHCI). Otherwise, your computer might not start from the new hard drive.
If you clone a disk with Windows to an external USB hard drive, you might not be able to boot from it. We recommend cloning to an internal SSD or HDD instead.
It is recommended not to format the source hard disk after the cloning until you are sure that the cloned target disk boots fine.
Cloning RAID disks
Cloning is supported only for simple disk partitioning systems, such as MBR and GPT. Acronis True Image cannot clone RAIDs set up as LVM or LDM. Hardware RAIDs and storage spaces can be cloned provided the environment where Acronis product is running (e.g. operating system) supports them, as Acronis True Image gets the information about RAID configuration from the environment. Cloning of a hardware RAID will work if a reboot is not required: after reboot, the operation continues in standalone version of Acronis True Image, where support of all hardware RAID configurations is not guaranteed and thus the cloning operation may fail after reboot. Acronis development team is working on improving hardware RAID support in bootable environment.
Step-by-step guide
If you use Acronis True Image 2017 or earlier version and you are going to do system disk cloning, we recommend that you do it using Acronis Bootable Media .
Even when you start cloning in Windows, the computer may reboot into the Linux environment the same as when booting from Linux-based rescue media. Because of this, it is better to clone using rescue media. For example, there may be a case when your hard disk drives are detected in Windows and not detected in bootable media environment. If this is the case, the cloning operation will fail after reboot. When booting from the rescue media, you can make sure that Acronis True Image detects both the source and target disks before starting the cloning operation.
I should of read the user guide first before creating this topic, because it does recommend:
"that you install the target (new) drive where you plan to use it and the source drive in another location, for example, in an external USB enclosure."
So I removed my C Drive from the internal SATA, and put it in the USB 3.0 Dock Station, and then tried cloning it to a target SSD I placed in the internal SATA slot. And that fixed the issue.
USB 3.0 Dock Station SATA III C Drive >>> Internal SATA III target SSD = Fixed the issue.
Why does it use USB 3.0 speed when the target SSD is in the internal SATA slot compared to when the target SSD is in the USB 3.0 Dock Station, which seems to be maybe using the Linux kernel OS, resulting in super slow cloning data transfer rate?
Internal SATA III SSD C Drive >>> USB 3.0 Dock Station SATA III target SSD = Super slow cloning data transfer rate.
You'll only get the best speeds possible for whatever the slowest media you're using. If the source is one speed and the destination is another (and vice versa) the process can only go as fast as the slowest source is capable. Plus, you never get the theoretical speed of any drive in real life especially when the advertised speed s are best case and real life speeds will be the 4k ones when dealing with OS files and folders that hav many nested folders and small files throughout them.
Also, depending on the rescue media, yes the best drivers may not be in use. Rescue media often used generic drivers to try and support all kinds of different hardware. The Linux rescue media is probably the most generic. Winpe using current ADK for Windows 10 1903 has some of the newest drivers. And you can supply your own for custom hardware if need be. Likewise, WinRE will use your system OS and current drivers, but if your on an old Windows 10 version or Windows 7, then your WinRE drivers could be less than optimal too.
Using the bootable media, If I clone the C drive (internal SATA III) to the target SSD (USB 3.0 dock station) the data transfer is super slow. But if I swap the drives around, and clone the C drive (USB 3.0 dock station) to the target SSD (internal SATA III) the data transfer is USB 3.0 speed. Why?
I would suspect that you are getting much higher read speeds from having the source drive attached via the USB 3.0 dock and writing to the internal SATA III drive, than the write speeds going the other way.
Agree with Steve. Read speed is always faster than write speed (by quite a bit in many cases). So if the READ is from USB and the write is to internal SATA, then that would likely be faster than when the READ is from the internal SATA and write is to the external USB.
Also keep in mind that not USB devices perform at their optimal capabilities. I have USB 3.1 flash drives that only read at about 150Mbps and write at about 50Mbps under optimal conditions. Different adapters, cables and ports on a computer can produce different results for USB speeds as well. When cloning, the 4K speeds of your usb adapter and disk, when writing to it, are going to be the main limiting factor to performance in that setup since you're going to be writing several very small and nested files and folders throughout the Windows system directory, various applications in program files, and other supporting data in your user profile %appdata% directories.
Theoretically that makes sense, but 20min vs. over 24 hours, that's a big difference.
Yes, that time does seem way off. However, the estimated time to complete also fluctuates depending on the type of data being accessed. I've seen the estimate time jump from an hour to 30 minutes, back to 2 hours, etc. and end up only taking 15 minutes (just an example).
Also, files in Windows/System32 are deeply nested and contain many small files - this will stress the devices capabilities (4K transfer speeds). Read speeds typically max out, but write speeds are where the slow downs really occur.
I can't remember if you mentioned the type of rescue media you made (Linux, WinPE or WinRE - and if WinPE or WinRE what ADK or OS was it built off of). If using the Linux version, you may be getting USB support, but with drivers at USB 1 or USB 2 only speeds.
Really not sure - I don't think there's a way to validate here, just some possible suggestions. In my own setups, where I typically use backup and restore (instead of clone), speeds seem to be pretty reasonable when using rescue media for either a backup or a restore, regardless if it's too an internal drive or a USB drive. I don't remember many (or any) forums where others are reporting this to be a consistent behavior like what you're experiencing.