Backup from recovery CD boot is very slow
Creating a backup from the 2016-6571 recovery CD is incredibly slow. My guess is about 0.6GBytes/minute. Similar hardware backs up at about 3GBytes/minute to a Seagate USB 3.0 external drive.
HP Pavilion dv7 laptop. Win 10. i7-3610QM CPU. 16GB RAM. Something like this, but with a 2nd HD, more RAM, and a 1920x1080 display:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834158576
Update: Its an HP Pavilion dv7t-7000 CTO Entertainment Notebook PC
Basically, a fairly new and fast machine. The only thing I find that's odd is the bios, which is by Insyde (F.29). No experience with that BIOS. I've run into this problem before with other versions of Acronis but have never found a satisfactory solution.
So far, I've made 2 overnight backups that took many times longer than I would normally expect. Both verified correctly but I'm sure this is not the way it's suppose to function. I don't want to install a licensed copy on this machine unless everything works. I'm going to try older builds and see if that helps, but after that, I'm out of ideas. Anything I can type on the Linux boot line that might help?
Update: I just tried 2015-6613. Same slow performance.
Couple of suggestions...
1) If possible, try creating a bootable USB flash drive instead - you may notice better performance booting off the USB instead of CD/DVD
I tried that and no difference in backup speed. Please note that I'm not having any problems with the time it takes for the recovery CD to boot. It's the actual backup that's taking 6 times as long as it should to perform an image backup that is the problem.
2) Are the UsB ports on the system all UsB 3.0... if not, are you using the USB 3.0 ports or the 2.0 ports?
This machine is weird. There are 3 USB ports and one USB 2.0 port. I have a mouse plugged into the USB 2.0 port to make sure I don't accidentally make that mistake. The Win 10 Device Manager and Speccy both show USB 3.0 on the proper ports, and for the extrernal Seagate BUP SL USB 3.0 drive I'm using as a backup destination drive.
3) Is it just as slow using a different USB port on the machine? On a PC, users will find that the front ports can be slower and have less power to provide than the back ports - perhaps the same may apply to this paritcular laptop if there are UsB ports on both sides.
I haven't tried that yet. I'm trying to avoid changing too many things at once. I've been alternating between two USB 3.0 ports on the left side of the machine. I'll try the remaining USB 3.0 port and see if that helps. I've seen the same effect you mention on some desktops, but not on a laptop.
4) Are you using the original USB 3.0 cable that came with the external drive. A few users in the forum found that they had accidentally swapped there's witha USB 2.0 cable, or were using a 2.0 extension cable.
The Seagate Backup Plus SLIM SL USB 3.0 drive uses a Micro-B Super Speed connector on the drive, and a USB 3.0 (blue) connector on the other. I tend to throw all the USB 3.0 drive cables in a big pile, and pick them out as needed. It's not the original cable, but it's the correct type of cable. I'll try another cable just to be sure.
4) Are you using an USB hubs? If so, are they powered or not? I would try without any hub at all. If you are using a hub, then, if possible, try with a different powered hub to make sure the system is supplying ample power to the external drive during the process. Hubs can be finicky, especially those that don't have external power.
No hub. The USB 3.0 drive is powered by the laptop.
Also, what type of internal hard drive is the laptop using (standard hard drive, hybrid SSD, or SSD). If it is mechanical, what is the spin speed (5400rpm, 5900rpm or 7200rpm). How big is it and how much free space is on it?
There are actually two drives in the machine. The drive involved is the C: drive which is a 1TB WDC 2.5" SATA III drive. I can't seem to extract the model number with any utility. No clue if it's 5400 or 7200 rpm. My guess would be 5400.
The 2nd drive is WDC WD750BPKT-60PK4T0 7200 rpm drive. I just tried the same backup and it's just as slow as the first drive. I don't think it's the drive. Also, both drives run quite fast in this machine.
Likewise, what is the model of the external drive (to determine if it is running at 5400rpm or 7200rpm) how big is it and how much free space is available.
It's a brand new and empty Seagate 2TB Backup Plus Drive. HDTune 2.55 shows the Seagate operating at an average transfer rate of about 100MBytes/sec and 15msec average access time. That's about typical for a USB 3.0 drive. However, since it's new and essentially untested, it might be defective.
On my laptops, using an internal SSD and an exernal SSD in a UsB 3.0 enclosure, I can take a backup of an 80GB OS in about 8 minutes and restore times are pretty similar. Using an external 7200RPM drive in the same usb 3.0 enclosure for the backup source, it can be closer to 30 minutes for the same backup. If I use my PC front ports, even though they're usb 3.0, I get slower transfer speeds than I do using the back ports. I also find that using my front ports, if I use an SSD (low power draw), I don't have any issues. But, with spinning drives, sometimes the external will randomly disconnect because they don't supply enough power on their own. With the back ports though, I don't have issues with drop outs and get faster transfer speeds.
I've never seen 10GB/min performance on any machine using any version of Acronis True Image. What I usually see is 1GB/min for USB 2.0 drives and 3 to 5GB/min for USB 3.0 drives. Looks like I get to take this laptop home for the weekend and try various hard disk drives, various USB ports, and possibly use an SSD as a target drive. Also, a possible BIOS update.
I stay away from hybrid drives completely. They will do you no good for backup or recovery speeds since the cache will be ingored for newly written data and will default to the spinning speed of the drive (which is usually 5400RPM, but depends on the hybrid drive itself).
I've already been burned enough by hybrid drives. Sequential access, such as streaming off the drive runs at the speed of the slowest storage device (the rotating hard disk). I don't use or sell them.
Thanks for the good advice. Results in a few days.
Update: I tried all three USB 3.0 ports. All are equally slow. I also substituted a Toshiba v6300c 1TB USB 3.0 drive for the target. Peformance seems to be somewhat faster. However, I can't be sure as I don't want to wait until it's done tonite. (It's been a 12 hr work day).
Yeah, hardware can make all the difference. In my test, I backup from an internal PCI NVME drive to an internal SSD drive. My OS is actually 71.3Gb (sorry, not 80). With system volume information filtered out, that leaves about 59Gb as I have hibernation turned off an a small page file. The full disk backup took 2 minutes and 56 seconds and got it compressed down to 39Gb. Even faster than I thought as my main backup target is an internal WD 2TB black drive and usually takes about 8 minutes which is about on par when I use an SSD and USB 3.0 adapter for external backups too.
Hopefully it's not a bad drive. A few of the externals that use the micro UsB 3.0 connector can be a little finick too if the connection is not just right. For my set and forget backups (internal 2TB WD black), i'm not too worried about speed, but it's acceptable. When I'm testing like this or about to do something drastic to my PC that may require a hasty recovery, I use the down and dirty SSD backup for speed and then copy those to the main storage later on for retention.
I picked up a PNY 2211 XLR8 MLC 240Gb SSD the other day for about $70 and have been impressed. I normally get the 850 evo's but price has been climbing on them and I'm not sure I wanted to go with the lower 750EVO. Regardless, there are some good SSD's for about $70 in the 250GB range and 500GBs in the $130 range. Not for everyone, but it sure makes things go fast :)
This is becoming rather weird. I just might be dealing with a bad hard disk drive. I ran HDtune 2.55 on the two internal drives and the external Seagate USB drive. The attached file ending in wdc.png is the first physical drive C: and the one giving me problems. I don't like what HDtune is showing. 66MB/sec is considerably slower than I would expect from a 1TB drive. The blue curve, showing transfer rate is suppose to look like 2nd physical drive, as in wd7500bpkt-60pk4.png. Quite a difference. Since the drive also refuses to identify itself, disclose parameters, and produce realistic S.M.A.R.T. numbers, I beginning to think this HP dv7t-7000 was shipped with a junk drive.
The yellow dots are data points for seek time. If the head actuator bearing is loose, the dots will be scattered all over the graph. The 750GB drive looks normal, but the 1TB shows zero seek time (bottom of graph) as well as a few too many excessively long seeks. I've never seen that before.
I also ran a test of the Seagate BUP SL USB 3.0 drive as in the file seagate_bup_slim_sl.png. The transfer rate curve (blue) looks normal, but the seek time (yellow dots) is all wrong. It's like it's refusing to seek over more than a few logical tracks. I've never seen that before. Maybe I'm fighting multiple problems here?
Replacing the 1TB drive with a 500GB SSD will be quite easy. Since the machine has 2 drive slots, I can clone the drive in the machine. I can also restore from an image backup, which is what I plan to do initially. However, if it takes 3 hrs, I'm not going to be very happy. I don't like working on weekends.
I'll drop in an SSD in place of the problematic WDC 1T drive after I make a successful image backup. I dragged myself home last night, setup the laptop for a backup, ran Acronis 2016, and went to bed. In the morning, I was presented with no backup and a depleted battery. I had forgotten to plug in the charger. Since backing up 105GB of data is taking 3+ hrs, it will be a while before I'm ready to try backing up the 750GB 2nd drive, and installing the SSD.
To be continued. This is becoming interesting (and weird)...
Yeah, it's strange that it doesn't detect the smart details and/or drive information of the primary. Perhaps grab the free version of HD sentinel and see if it can give you any additional details or find something wrong with it.
What's the specific model # of the Pavilion 7? Perhaps we can find the HD specs of the drive online. Or, if you have easy access to the drive, it should be listed on the drive sticker. Curious to what model is being used.
HP Pavilion dv7t-7000 CTO Quad Edition Entertainment Notebook PC.
Extra points to HP for the rather long name, and then not bothering to inscribe it anywhere on the laptop. I found a few clues on the serial number label, located under the battery, where I couldn't get to it while the machine was sloooooowly backing up. Grrrr.
Bingo. I tried the built in system diagnostics (hit F2 during boot):
which produced the attached details. I'll check the WDC site later for firmware updates.
However, there's an obvious problem. It's now showing numbers for the 1st drive (WD 1TB) but is showing garbage for the 2nd drive (750GB) which is really a WDC drive, not a Samsung 32GB drive. I guess that I should mention that the updating the laptop BIOS failed last night. I tried to backup the current image and create a recover flash drive. It bombed near the end, which I'll also investigate today. That might be why I'm not getting drive parameters in any Windoze programs. Looks like I'm dealing with a BIOS/Hardware problem, not an Acronis problem.
Bummer - best of luck. Hopefully a bios flash will get things back on track. Very strange indeed with the 2nd drive completely showin up as a different model (make and vendor) and size too!
BIOS update successful, but didn't fix the problem. The 105GB backup took 3.5 hrs. Argh.
The phantom Samsung 32GB drive is for real. It also shows up in the Intel Rapid Storage Technology boot screen ( <ctrl> I ), which begs the question "What happened to the 2nd physical hard disk drive"? Looks like HP decided to build a do-it-themselves Hybrid disk drive system, with the SSD located externally to the drive and somewhere on the motherboard. Why they needed to invent a new filesystem or enable RAID is currently a mystery. Laptop overall performance is quite good, except Acronis 2016 has no clue on how to deal with the Hybrid drive, claiming that it's an unknown or unsupported file system. Gparted can't read whatever is on the NTFS filesystem. No, it's not encrypted. See attached error messages.
I tried restoring to the SSD from the backup TIB file, which failed when Acronis 2016 cleverly decided to do a sector by sector restore, even though I selected NOT to do a sector by sector restore. Extra points to the programmist for not bothering to inform the user that the setting had been changed. I only noticed when selecting the target drive, and having Acronis True Image inform me that I needed ignore some 450GB on the source drive in order to fit 1TB onto a 500GB SSD.
I'll probably have to use Gparted to shrink the partition from about 900GB to slightly smaller than what will fit on the 500GB SSD, do the sector by sector restore, and then resize the partition afterwards with Gparted. Perhaps I can find a better cloning utility, or maybe just give up on this machine since everything works on it except Acronis 2016.
Anyone got some ideas on how to get past this mess?
OK. This may make more sense if it is indeed a 32Gb SSD caching drive and not the 750GB WD drive you mentioned earlier. There are some other boards that come with built in SSD Cache drives as well and these absolutely will not clone with Acronis as Acronis cloning does not support dynamic disks (which is how these are setup up so that the small SSD is a caching parition and the spinner is the main drive, but they are dynamically linked together as a hybrid drive)
In these instances, one must do a full disk backup and restore and for-go any hopes of cloning.
45886: Hybrid Drives Are Not Supported in Acronis Bootable Environment
The alternative is to disable the cache drive completely and break the RAID with that drive. If upgrading to an SSD there is really no loss here, but to keep the speed with a spinning drive, probably not something most people would be willing to do.
As for the sector by sector restore - this will be the default, regardless of the settings selected, if bad sectors are found on the source drive. You may want to run chkdsk /f /r on the source drive and then attempt again.