True Image 8.0 (771) CD booted performance degradation (Promise SATA)

Hi;

I just upgraded from Acronis True Image 7.0 (734) to True Image 8.0 (771). I've noticed that the 'upgrade' seems to have severly degraded the 'recovery CD' performance on my system.

A Backup from one drive (native ATA-100) to another (SATA attached) went from about 9.5 minutes to 30 over minutes. I've also noticed that the disk order (1, 2, etc.) when booted from the recovery CD has changed on the backup menu.

With 7.0 (634) I get:
Disk 1: ATA C:- FAT32
D:- FAT 32
E:- FAT32
F:- FAT32

DISK 2: SATA G:- NTFS
DISK 3: SATA H:- NTFS
DISK 4: SATA I:- NTFS

With 8.0 (771) I get:
Disk 1: SATA G: - NTFS
Disk 2: SATA H: - NTFS
Disk 3: SATA I: - NTFS
Disk 4: ATA C: FAT32
D: FAT32
E: FAT32
F: FAT32

My system has a Promise SATA150 TX4 (4 port NON-raid) SATA controller as an add-on PCI card. The Motherboard is an Asus P4B-266 Pentium 4 system.

My 'C:-F:' drive is attached to the Primary IDE controller built-in to the motherboard. The other three drives are on SATA ports on the Promise SATA-150 TX4.

So, whatever has changed appears to have affected drive order and severly degraded my disk-disk backup performance in the 'Booted CD' environment.

Is this a known problem?

Thanks;

-Greg Bohn

 

For what it's worth, I believe I've found the cause of my sever performance degradation (in the Booted CD environment), and it appears to be specific to only Acronis True Image 8.

It looks like the IDE drive on my motherboard (Intel 845D chipset) is not being operated in DMA mode under True Image 8.

Acronis support says that the IDE drive might 'hang' if operated in UDMA mode, so they prevented it.

If true, this seems like some sort of Linux driver problem.

Especially since my system seems to work fine in UDMA-100 mode under Windows 2000, Win 98 (DMA mode), Power Quest Drive Image 6, Knoppix 3.6 (debian Linux, DMA mode verified with hdparm), and Acronis True Image 7.

At least so far, I've never experienced this 'hang problem' using these other environments / operating systems on the same system hardware. And I've extensively used my system under at least Win 2000 and Drive Image/DOS.

I'm not very happy to have spent $29.00 for an 'upgrade' only to get a severe performance drop instead.

And to make matters worse, Acronis didn't answer my question about whether this will ever be 'fixed', or if there's a way to override the default DMA/No DMA mode.

 

Hello gbohn,

Can you please tell me the Acronis number of your request to our Support Team (support@acronis.com)?

Thank you.

--
Best regards,
Andrew Berezovsky

Acronis, Inc.
395 Oyster Point Blvd., Suite 213
South San Francisco, CA 94080 USA
http://www.acronis.com/

Acronis support department
e-mail: support@acronis.com

Acronis... compute with confidence

 

I may have spoken too soon. This afternoon I just got a message telling me to try a test version of True Image 8.

I've just finished a quick test, but so far it seems to work much better. I'll have to wait and see if the plan is to incorporate this version/change into a release.

In answer to your question, did you want me to post the ticket number here, or send it to support@acronis.com?

Thanks;

-Greg Bohn