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Slow Backup to Drobo 5C

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I downloaded the trial of True Image 2019 yesterday and started a backup to my Drobo 5C. I have setup a back of about 10 TB across 5 hard drives in my desktop computer. Most of the files are photos.

It has been about 30 hours and the backup is not complete. If I look on the Drobo, there is 1 file that is about 4 TB in size and there is a second file that it appears to be working on. I think Windows has a 4 TB file limit.

When I started the backup, I did not change any setting from the defaults. Is this speed make sense? It seems I am on pace to backup all my files in about 4 days.

Also note, I am connected to a USB 3.1 port with my USB C cable so I think the connection has the ability to perform much faster.

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Most Acronis backups are consolidated into a *.tib file which can be very large. If the storage media has normal file system then there should be one file only. If it uses a legacy file system like FAT32 of exFAT there will be multiple files. If you use continuous backup the backup is broken into a series of 1gig files (at least that is wha happens on my Synology NAS).

Update: Just notice the external device is connected by USB not Ethernet. The speed should be better, but I would check the settings for the device, particularly the power settings.

Ian

William, 

I've had a look at the Drobo 5C.  You might have it connected to a USB 3.1 port on your computer but the Drobo is a USB 3.0 device so the connection speed maximum will be 5Gbps or 625MB/s.  To achieve greater than that the computer, connecting cable, and connected device must be USB 3.1 Gen 2 compliant.

Your bottleneck however is not your connection method but rather the rest of your hardware, more specifically, your drives, ram and cpu in that order. 

As I understand you have a 5 drive array in your computer and you are backing up to an NAS device that can have 5 drives, not sure that you do, and is using a BeyondRAID virtualization system.  

I would think using the best HDD'S which I consider to be WD Datacenter drives you might reach an average of around 150MB/s on writes.  You should get around 230MB/s reads with the same drives.

If your Drobo was a 5N model and had an SSD cache you could squeeze out a bit more perhaps.  If you increase your ram capacity you will gain some as well.  A good rule of thumb is 1GB of ram for every TB of HDD space.

Be advised that True Image uses its own compression and the data you are working with is already compressed. If you turn off True Image compression you should gain some performance as well.

Your 4TB file limit is probably that of BeyondRAID.  I do not know if BeyondRAID can deal with 4k drives but if it can you would gain some by using that as well given the type of data you are dealing with.

Having said all of that, I would bet your biggest bottleneck is the 5 drive array in your computer.  I suspect your using a raid array, what mode, 5, 10, ?  It doesn't really matter that much as you would be hard pressed to get more than 120MB/s out of a raid array of any mode.

En réponse à par truwrikodrorow…

Thanks Ian. I checked and my Drobo has an NTFS file system. This is day 4 of my backup and I have 4 files tib files at this point and the backup is still running.

En réponse à par truwrikodrorow…

Great info. Thank you. The hard drives in my computer are not in an array. I have an SSD system drive and 5 hard drives that range from 4 to 8 TB each. My Drobo is populated with 3 4TB and 2 8TB drives.

My computer has a Gigabyte Z370 Aorus Gaming 7 motherboard with an i7-8700K and 32 GB of ram.

Based on your estimate of 120MB/s. 10TB should backup in about 8.5 days.

Is the 120MB/s still a good estimate based on my system?

I think so.  Given your last post here It sounds like you selected multiple drives to be included in a single backup file.  These individual drives will only read at a given rate, reads being faster than write operations.

Open Windows Task Manager and click on the performance tab.  You will see listed your cpu, network connections, hard disks, etc.  Of interest here is your hard disks, looking at and selecting whichever one is backing up at the moment you can see what the data transfer rate is.  The rate will vary up and down but by watching it for awhile you should be able to estimate an average. 

I would also say that the 4TB file you mentioned earlier showing on your Drobo was a completed disk image of one of your drives.

If it were me doing this with your setup I would create backups for each drive individually.  Much faster to backup and easier to restore.

I agree that it is much more effective to use separate backup tasks for each drive, and in some case each partition. The frequency of the backup can then be tailored to the importance of the content and the frequency with which it changes.

Ian

En réponse à par truwrikodrorow…

Again, thank you. This is great information.

My transfer rate at this moment is around 42 MB/s. This doesn't sound good compared to the 120 MB/s. Do you think this is partly a result of selecting multiple drives?

En réponse à par truwrikodrorow…

Excellent point on the tailored backup frequency. I have 2 drives that basically never change. I could reduce the backup frequency to quarterly.

I think I am going to terminate this backup and start again.

En réponse à par truwrikodrorow…

I tried a few things to improve the transfer speed. I ended up swapping from my Amazon USB-C to USB-A  cable to the USB-C to USB-A cable that came with the Drobo. That made a difference. My transfer speed is now averaging about 125 MB/s. I would like to get a longer cable than the Drobo cable. Any recommendations? Obviously the Amazon cable did not work even though the specs seem to indicate it should have worked.

Ahh, you found the Achilles heel!  Very good.  I wouldn't trust cables from Amazon, eBay, etc.  Your usually going to get cheap knockoffs at best.

I have had good results buying cables from Cables to Go.  Expect to pay for it though.  You get what you pay for.