Painfully slow USB performance

I'm experiencing painfully slow USB performance when running the standalone version of Acronis True Image from CD mainly for restoring the system drive. I tried backup and restore and they are about four times slower than backing up from Windows. I have a 500GB Western Digital My Book Essentials USB 2.0 hard drive. My Gateway system specifications are as follows.


Specifications
Part Number: 6153Gateway GM5048 Media Center Computer
Model: GM5048

Following are the specifications for the Gateway® GM5048 Media Center computer.
Feature Specification
Processor Intel® Pentium® D procesor 930
3.0 GB
800 MHz front side bus
L2 cache: 1 MB x2
775-pin package

Memory 2048 MB DDR2 533 MHz (PC2-4200) SDRAM (four 512 MB modules)
Expandable to: 4 GB

Video NVIDIA 6200 64 MB Turbo cache video card
TV Tuner Card Powercolor Tul Theater 550 PRO TV tuner
Integrated Audio Intel High Definition Audio subsystem consisting of:
8-channel (7.1) audio subsystem with five analog audio outputs and one S/PDIF optical digital audio output using the Sigmatel® 9220 audio codec

Hard Drive 500 GB 7200 RPM SATA2 hard drive
Optical Drives Double layer 16X DVD+/-RW drive
16X DVD-ROM drive

Media Reader 9-in-1 Digital Media Manager supporting the following:

CompactFlash Card
IBM MicroDrive
Memory Stick
Memory Stick Pro
SmartMedia Card
Secure Digital(SD)/MMC
Compact Flash
Multimedia Card
xD-Picture Card
USB 1.1

Modem 56K ITU V.92 ready Fax/Modem
Network Integrated 10/100 LAN
Interfaces PS/2 keyboard port
PS/2 mouse port
Seven USB 2.0 ports (four on rear panel, two on front panel, one in media reader)
Three IEEE-1394a connectors (one on rear panel, two on front-panel)
One VGA monitor port
One parallel port
One serial port
One RJ-45 LAN port
Seven audio jacks (five on rear panel, two on front panel)
One S/PDIF digital audio out

Add-In Card Slots One PCI-Express ×16
One PCI-E ×1
Two PCI Conventional

Drive Bays Two external 3.5-inch
Two external 5.25-inch
Two internal 3.5-inch

Input Devices Multimedia keyboard
USB optical mouse
Media Center remote control

Speakers Amplified stereo speakers
Dimensions (H × W × D) 15.4 × 7.3 × 17.9 inches
Weight 23.5 lbs (computer only, no packaging)

 

Have you tried different USB ports ? I believe this machine has USB 2.0, but it sounds like the 9in1 area has a much slower 1.1

Have you experimented with Bart PE ? If perhaps the built in drivers for the boot disk are weak, then it may run faster in a PE environment.

 

I can think of no valid reason to create a backup when booted from the recovery CD. As you have found on your computer it is slower so why do it? I have always created backup images while booted in Windows by now these must run into thousands and present no problem at all.

When it comes to restores my experience is broadly the same as yours. If you are going to do lots of restores it make sense to do something about it, but if it is a relatively rare event you could accept the slowness and be thankful that it works.

Like most things to do with computers there are several work arounds that you could use. A favourite around here is to recover using a Bart PE CD with TI plugin for restores. You should find that this will run your restore much more quickly. On my particular machine I found that a USB restore took just over half the time of a Windows backup.

Another approach is to give up on USB drives and install a secondary drive for your backups which is by far the quickest method. The icing on the cake would be to install an exchangable drive rack in the spare 5.25 bay you have below the optical drive. In this you could install your main drive which would be swapped with another for your restores. Once I set off down this road all other methods seem inadequate.

Xpilot

 

I can't restore the Windows XP partition using the Windows version because Windows XP is a system partition that cannot be restored while in use and can only be restored from the Acronis boot CD.

 

I have problems creating the BartPE CD because I don't have a retail version of Windows XP. The OEM version doesn't work properly with PEBuilder due to some files missing or mismatched.

 

Have a search around this board. I believe that some have been sucessful in making a PE CD starting from an OEM version and ignoring the warnings. I have no experience of this myself so cannot help further.

Xpilot

 

Have you actually tried it? My understanding is that if you have a Microsoft OEM XP CD, the one you get at the mom and pop computer store with new hardware, it works fine. If you have an OEM that has been tailored by a large computer manufacturer then you may have trouble.

 

I don't have any Microsoft OEM CD either. I have an OEM version that is customized by the computer manufacturer.

 

Keith Weisshar,

Do you have an i386 folder in your C drive? This can be used as "Source" for building a BartPE or ReatogoXPE CD. But you must choose the folder containing the i386 folder. Say you had C:\Windows\i386, then for Source you would choose C:\Windows.

This has worked for some people with customized CDs.