DD and copying 320G HDD in the Quickest Manner

metallica1973 · 12-16-2010, 03:02 PM

My questions is copying entire 320 HDD and the fastest way of doing this. When I do perform a standard copy of a ubstick, it generally takes about 45 minutes to DD a 16G stick. Can someone please enlighten me? I can remember using Norton Ghost and it wasnt to bad but when I really think about it, those HDD where alot smaller then they are today.

stress_junkie · 12-16-2010, 03:04 PM

USB is a relatively slow interface compared to PATA or SATA. That is why it takes a long time to move 16 GB through that interface.

The fastest way to move that much data would be between two SATA 2 disks on the same motherboard.

Actually you could speed that up if you the source disk was a RAID 0 virtual disk and the target disk was another RAID 0 virtual disk, both comprised of SATA 2 disks AND the RAID was implemented entirely in hardware. That is probably the fastest configuration for moving data.

metallica1973 · 12-16-2010, 03:20 PM

Many thanks

the hdd that I would like to begin copying is actually a 320G external usb HDD. I would like to create an image and them start copying them to each new usb 320G hdd. Can I just:

PHP Code:



DD if=/path/to/image of=/path/to/device

and bam all is well or is there some trick that I can run? thanks

and if you want to see a progress bar then try this trick but it:

PHP Code:



dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda & pid=$! && while kill -USR1 $pid; do sleep 15; done

stress_junkie · 12-16-2010, 03:23 PM

Sometimes adjusting the amount of data read and written in each operation can affect speed.

dd if=<whatever1> of=<whatever2> bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror

Changing the bs= value to various powers of two might affect the speed.

metallica1973 · 12-17-2010, 08:47 AM

I will give that a shot, many thanks