Acronis TI SPEED ISSUES

hi

I've been deploying/cloning one PC to lots of machines the whole day and i can't help but notice that one some machines, cloning takes 15 minutes... while on others it takes over an hour!!! All computers have the same specs..

here's one very clear example.. some brand new computers arrived today.. (the rest are old ones purchased back in 2004 )

i got one source drive and one destination drive..

scenario one:

i used an Athlon X2 3600 with 1GB RAM, BIOSTAR NF61S main board..
cloning took around an hour...

i got another fresh destination drive... but this time used the OLD computers.. ASUS A7V8-X board, with Athlon XP 2600 and 512MB RAM..
cloning took around 20 minutes..

all drives are the same.. 80Gb MAXTOR 7200 RPM, PATA..

What the heck am I missing here?

 

Different hardware, different chipsets ... Acronis is very picky when it comes to hardware.

 

i did kinda notice that... while Symantec ghost is almost reasonably the same in speed across all hardware setups i've encountered..

Are the people at Acronis aware of this? this sucks.. Cloning 80GB of data that takes over an hour.. even on high end computer specs..

 

I assume you are running from the rescue CD which is Linux based. You may want to try using a BartPE CD Begginer's Guide to Creating a BartPE CD which uses windows drivers. The Linux drivers are notorious for being slow even with fast hardware. I also don't see what version and build of TI you are using but I may have missed it.

 

This is exactly why I've been suggesting (since version 6) that True Image have a throughput indicator. (Like Ghost has had since version 1.) I still can't believe that Acronis can't implement something like this so we can test the actual (real-time) throughput without timing it ourselves.

 

well im running via the boot agent.. which is kinda like the bootCD as well.. havent tried cloning within windows environment though.. perhaps i'll try that next time..

actually acronis TI was pretty accurate.. when it extimated completion at 46 minutes, i actually finished around 43 minutes.. which is fairly accurate..

while GHOST started out with an estimate of 1 hour and 20 minutes.. it kept going down and back up occasionally.. couldnt really count on it..but actual time of completion was around 16 minutes..

 

hi guys.. sorry to bring this thread up again but are there any new news or fixes for this?

coz now im getting 10 hours remaining on an X2 3600 processor, 512mb ram, emaxx mobo, IDE hard drive.. it's been running for about 2 hours now and it seems im really gona have to wait HOURS and HOURS..

once again,i tried to clone with ghost,same machine same source same destination, done in 30 minutes..

 

I noticed something.. i tried doing the cloning via windows based (instead of the boot agent interface), and it seems to work normally there!

why is this?

 

Hello all,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

BrownChiLD, first of all please make sure that you use the latest build of your Acronis product, which is available on our web site at http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/support/updates/ . Having the most recent build of Acronis products is always strongly recommended since has better modern hardware support, improved engine algorithms and corrected errors if any. It becomes even more major when facing with some performance issues in rescue mode (i.e. Acronis Bootable Standalone version) since it is based on Linux which as an OS actually has worse drivers support from most hardware vendors compared to Windows. Acronis Development Team is working hard on adding new versions of drivers to the Acronis bootable environment to improve hardware support and performance in each new build.

If you still have any performance issues with the latest builds of Acronis products please submit a request for technical support. Please provide the step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appears and the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with a solution.

Thank you.

Best Regards,
Alexey Bogomolov

 

There are a lot of system hardware settings that could affect your hard disk throughput speeds. here are some examples: Are all of the systems using the same UDMA settings in Windows for example? Is UDMA even enabled for the controller in Windows? Are the drives running in PIO mode? Windows will drop back to slower DMA settings if it detects any errors when writing to devices like hard drives, including PIO. Is there an optical drive sharing the same drive cable(s)? Are the motherboard BIOS versions all the same? Is the memory installed as 128-bits versus 64-bits in all of the PC's? Are the correct type ATA cables installed between the controllers and the hard drives? Are the drives on separate IDE channels or are they sharing a single channel? Is write caching enabled or disabled on the drives? Were the drives defragmented prior to cloning? There are literally hundreds of different hardware settings that can cause even the same model computers to run at different data rates. The fact that they run faster under the boot disk (Linux) makes me suspect registry or other hardware settings in Windows are at fault.

 

Hello all

I had to revive this tread because of a similar problem. I have been using TI since Ver 8. I currently have Ver 10 build 4942. For off site backups I use the cloning function via Standalone boot CD. My resident hard disk is a 80gb Western Digital WD 800. I have 3 80gb Western Digital WD 800's that I backup too I rotate backups (Via the Cloning Feature) on a regular basis. I have been doing this for a number of years. Each clone takes about 20 min to complete. That is until last week. One of the backup hard disks now takes 80 minutes to complete. Since this issue maybe caused by error recovery, I went ahead and ran the WD Diagnostics against this disk. Everything came up clean. The only thing that I have not yet performed is some sort of low level format. It seems strange that out of the blue it started to do this. Any Ideas.

Thx for your time.

 

Hello storage_man,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Could you please clarify if there was any recent change in usage of the drive in question? Please also clarify, does the longer time occur when cloning to the drive, or from the drive?
Please make sure the drive connection cables and sockets are fine.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

If the progress bar in ATI 11 doesn't work right, why would you rely on a throughput indicator ;-)

 

Marat

To answer your questions:

Could you please clarify if there was any recent change in usage of the drive in question?: The drive has always been used as a backup clone. Its last use was August 30, 2007.

Please also clarify, does the longer time occur when cloning to the drive, or from the drive?: The drive has always been used as the TOO drive.

Please make sure the drive connection cables and sockets are fine.: Here is what my configurations looks like 1) all drives (IDE/SATA) are in removable cradles. 2) The Primary IDE (Drive 0) is my resident 80 GB OS with 3 partitions, the first being NTFS for the Windows (14GB), the second a FAT32 for data (24GB) and the third NTFS for additional data (36GB). The Primary IDE (Drive 1) usually empty and is only used during the cloning backup process. The Secondary IDE (Drive 0) is a LG CD/DVD RW. The Secondary IDE (Drive 1) is not used. The Primary SATA channel has a Seagate 300gb drive and again it is in a removable cradle. The secondary SATA Channel is not used.

Remember that there are two other 80GB backup cloned drives that complete in 20/25min that use the same connection as the 80GB drive that is in question. The only thing I have not done is to physically swap the drive cradles. I will plan on doing just that to try to eliminate the speculation of a bad cradle.

I did notice one other item of interest: When cloning to the drives that complete in 20min, the device activity light on both cradles are almost ON continuously. During the backup clone to the drive in question, there is a noticeable FLASH in the activity lights of both cradles.

I will let you know about the swapping of cradles as soon as I can.

Thx Roger


Cradles have been swapped and I attemped a Clone - Initial projection said 3hours, I let it run for about 1.5hrs and it said it still had 1.2hrs left. It looked like it was just under 1/2 completed. It looks more and more like this performance problem has some thing to do with the drives error recovery.

I await your reply - Roger

 

If it's an IDE drive, you might check in the computer's BIOS (or in Windows) and verify what the connection speed is. It should be UDMA 5 or 6. Perhaps something "kicked" it down for some reason.

 

MudCrab


Both primary and slave show as being UMDA 5

Thx

 

Hello storage_man,

Could you please collect some information to let us investigate the problem thoroughly?

Please create Acronis Report as it is described in Acronis Help Post with the drive in question connected. Please also mention, which letter is the drive assigned in Windows.

Then submit a request for technical support. Attach all the collected files and information to your request along with the step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appears and the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with a solution.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

Will Do it and I will post when I got it all

Thx Roger

Sysinfo file has been uploaded under your name "Marat Setdikov"

Hope to hear from you soon.

Thx Roger