Backup speed and size of archive drive

I am using 64-bit Win 7 on a Del Precision T7400 workstation. I am a refugee from Acronis and am very happy with the reliability of Paragon Drive Backup 10 Professional. However, while performing some backup runs with Drive Backup, I have noticed a difference in backup speed depending on selection of the archive drive.

My system has three SATA disk drives and one controller. Two of the drives are 500 GB, and the third is a 1 TB drive. I have performed some timing runs while backing up my C: (system) partition, which is on Disk 0 and have discovered that the backup time is about 70% longer when backing up to the backup capsule, which is located in its own 419 GB partition on the 1 TB Disk 2 drive. The other archive location is on a 256 GB NTFS partition on Drive 1.

I am guessing that the cylinder bit density may be different on the 1 TB drive, because when I purchased the drive mention was made that it used the new perpendicular recording technique. Perhaps the two 500 GB drives use the older lower density longitudinal recording method. I would like to know if anyone else has noticed this speed difference?

Comments and suggestions will be appreciated.

 

I haven't specifically tested this scenario, but I would agree that since both of the backups are to SATA drives that are not the source, the only difference could be the drives themselves. I would look at the manufacture's website for both of the drives and see if there is a difference in write speeds, since there clearly is a difference in performance.

 

The sustained transfer rate is about the same, with a slight edge for the 500 GB drive. But I am curious about the buffer sizes of the backup program along with threading issues.

 

Threading and buffer sizes should be irrelevant in this case, since they effect overall performance and are the same, as well as the operation. Since the only difference is the storage location, then that is likely the cause of any difference in backup performance.

Another thing you could try is doing a file-level backup as a test and see if there is the same difference in speed, its possible that for some reason the 1TB drive is particularly slow when performing sector-based operations.

 

Rotational speed difference?

For Tommy: Is the backup capsule NTFS? If not, does it matter?

Same optimizations enabled in Windows disk driver? Write cache enabled etc.

 

The rotational speed is the same, but the packing density is greater on the 1 TB drive (this drive has only 4 platters!). I have observed this same affect when using Ghost 2003 to back up one partition onto a drive of different size. There are no latency problems when the drives are the same size.

I will check, but almost certainly the write cache is enabled on all three drives. I do not understand why buffer sizes would not be involved when the drives are not matched and latency might then become an issue.

The suggestion of doing a file copy test is a good idea.