why is TI 9 so slow???

why is TI 9 so slow [solved: hardware issue]

i have a inspiron 8600 laptop with a 100GB drive in it. i want to do a full backup. i bought TI because i heard great things about it. my destination drive is a usb2 external 250GB drive.

when i run TI either from within windows or using the recovery CD, either way the estimated time to run is 1 day and 9 hours

i did let it run for about 5 hours to see if the estimate would get better. the number above was the estimate at the end of those 5 hours.

what bug me the most is that i would prefer not to do incrementals as i don't trust giant archive files for more than a few weeks. generally my backup strategy is to backup everything every 2 weeks. i can't take a day and a half every two weeks to do a TI backup tho. that's just crazy.

the drive is only 60% full and it takes less than an 2 hours to copy 50GB to my usb2 external drive so i don't think those are the issues...

i've turned off all validation and encryption and it had almost no effect on TI's 1 day 9 hour estimate.

anyone have any ideas? is this a typical time to back up a 100GB drive with 60GB of data on it?

edit: i am using True Image Home v9.0 build 3677

edit: i changed the subject of the thread to reflect that this was a hardware issue

 

p.s. if anyone knows of a good alternative please pm me. features required:
. complete system backup (not interested in backing up files, i want the drive imaged)
. recovery disk must be CD or USB drive (no floppies in my house). i.e no BootIt NG
. must be "fast" (max 8-10 hours to backup 100GB)

does not need to do backups in real time using that shadow voodoo... i don't mind booting from cd especially if the backup would run faster...

 

popmonkey,

I'm not sure what the problem is, but your post caught my eye since my wife owns an Inspiron 8600 with a 60 GB drive (~13 GB used space) and it has the latest TI version installed (and has had TI since ver 7). I just did an image backup to her external USB2 Maxtor drive from Windows and it took about 20 minutes, which was similar to many of the image backups I had previously performed with TI ver 8.

It's clear that there is a problem on your system. In the one case where I had something similar, it was a bad external USB hub (broken or poorly designed - not sure which I simply tossed it). I'd check all aspects related to the USB subsystem as a place to start.

Blue

 

I just did a test using a 8.5GB file and my PC will copy a file in Windows XP to my USB2 drive at 1.35GB/min. This is a 60GB 7200rpm IDE drive in the USB case. Based on this number your 50GB should have taken 37 minutes not around 2h.

Have a look in the XP Event Viewer to see if there are any problems logged in the System or any other log pertaining to the USB device in particular or anything else that doesn't look right.

A backup to an internal HD should run somewhere around 1GB/min but it depends on the system. To a USB drive I would think it should be done within 1.5h.

 

thanks blue and seek. i went ahead and ran some tests with the destination drive as well as borrowing a friend's external. and what do you know, my external drive is bad! it's about 20x slower than the reference drive over the same cable.

thanks!

any suggestions for a reliable external? this is my second Western Digital external. the first failed after a year of light use. i then replaced the hard drive in the enclosure and that's the one that has gotten slow. there are no errors in the event log and all diagnostics say the drive is ok. is it possible that i screwed up by mounting the new WD drive in a mismatched enclosure? is it even worth trying to change the enclosure?

anyway, thanks again.

 

Hi popmonkey,

The proof of the pudding is in the eating as they say. Is it possible to speak to your friend nicely and temporarily mount your external HD in his enclosure? If the problem remains then you have a duff WD hard drive but if it's resolved then you have an incompatible/faulty external HD enclosure.

Regards

 

i did something similar, Menorcaman. i installed the backup hd in an old tower that i use as a firewall and running a benchmark on the drive found the transfer rate around 40Mbs. not bad. however, plugged in through the enclosure the rate drops to 1Mbs. so i just ordered a new enclosure from newegg.

 

All of mine are Maxtor except for a WD Passport for travel (and that's basically for light utility work). I've had no problems with either (nor with my old HD's which I've tended to pop into Adaptec enclosures).

Blue

 

thanks all.

just to wrap up, i picked up a popular and inexpensive enclosure from newegg, installed the WD drive in it, and was able to backup my laptop in 2 hours. that's totally reasonable for my needs. i sleep longer than 2 hours

 

If you run "Chkdsk", and then "Defrag" (5 or 6 times) right before you actually make your Backup Images, then it will probably take less time.

 

The USB bridge could have been USB 1.1, not USB 2.
THat would account for the time differences.

 

Over USB 1.x, things are absoutely ponderous.