[neilw]

Machine: 1 month old 20" iMac, 2 GHz, running 10.4.2

I just put a Seagate 250 GB drive into a Firewire enclosure (Oxford 911-based), and used the Disk Utility "Restore" function to clone my internal drive onto the external drive. I have about 56 GB of data on the drive.

I was taken aback by how slow the operation was. Looking at the Disk Throughput readout in Activity Monitor, I saw numbers ranging from about 1 MB/s to 10 MB/s. The whole thing took hours, don't know exactly because I left it running and went to sleep after a while.

I also noticed that while this process was underway, my CPU utilization was quite high (mostly System), again surprising me.

Needless to say, a G5 + fast Firewire drive should be capable of going way the hell faster than this. Is the Disk Utility restore function inherently slow? Would third-party cloners be faster? I used to use CCC, but it doesn't seem the best choice to use under Tiger (yet). Super Duper is a likely possibility, I guess.

But I'm trying to understand if I should expect this to be that slow, or if I have a hardware problem or something. Anyone have any insight? I shall do some basic benchmarking of the drive as soon as I get a chance, to see raw speed large file transfers can attain.

[scoot]

Sounds like you were trying to clone your boot drive while booted to it. While CCC can do this, as it excludes various temp files and swap files, Disk Util tries to grab the whole drive. I'm surprised it was even able to finish.

Disk Utilty can handle this with no problems, if you're not trying to clone the current boot drive.

In future, boot to your OSX.4 DVD and run Disk Util from there to restore. I used this last week to restore about 200 machines from a custom disk image, also booting from drive not involved in the clone. These took about 10-15 min for a 10GB image, if I recall correctly. You won't be able to use Activity Monitor, but then it won't take nearly as long either.

--
Scott

[JellyBeen]

Originally Posted by scoot

Sounds like you were trying to clone your boot drive while booted to it. While CCC can do this, as it excludes various temp files and swap files, Disk Util tries to grab the whole drive. I'm surprised it was even able to finish.

Disk Utilty can handle this with no problems, if you're not trying to clone the current boot drive.

In future, boot to your OSX.4 DVD and run Disk Util from there to restore. I used this last week to restore about 200 machines from a custom disk image, also booting from drive not involved in the clone. These took about 10-15 min for a 10GB image, if I recall correctly. You won't be able to use Activity Monitor, but then it won't take nearly as long either.

--
Scott

Good tip

[neilw]

Yes indeed, thanks for the tip. I was in fact copying the startup disk, which I later read was not supposed to work but Disk Utility didn't complain and succeeded with the copy, albeit ultra-slowly.

I'll try booting off a different drive and giving it another try. I did do some basic file transfers of large files to the external drive and found that it's overall performance is fine. We'll see how the restore works when done correctly.

[neilw]

That did the trick. Restore went at almost 30 MB/s consistently when booted from alternate volume.

Now I think I'll still need to get Super Duper, but at least I can do basic full backups as needed now.

Thanks!