Cloning a 1TB hard drive time?

[Chung123]

Last night, I started to back up and carbon copy clone a 1TB 7200 rpm hard drive (my photos drive) to another 7200rpm 1TB hard drive via a eSATA dock and I'm amazed it takes 17 hours and counting to clone the 900gb of data(photos) on my Mac Pro 5,1.

I wonder what the next advancement will be to improve data copy speeds?

It seems like a lot of time when dealing with such large quantities of data. It works out to 51 gb per hour? Are these typical speeds? I'm suspecting yes.

 

[Flint Ironstag]

Sounds about right for non RAID spinny disks. Especially with a ton of individual files.

The next advancement is here already. It's called SSD.

 

[H2SO4]

Not sure how it compares but I clone half of that, (while booted into recovery), in about 3 hours.
Internal is Samsung EVO 1TB.
External is Samsung M3 portable.
Interface FW800.

 

[h9826790]

Photos are all small files, I won't be surprised that takes looong time to copy thousands of small files from a HDD, even the overall file size is not considered huge.

This is the main reason why SSD is much more superior than HDD, nothing to do with the xxxMB/s (which a HDD RAID 0 array can match the SSD), but the low latency between reading small files.

 

[tomvos]

Turning off Spotlight Indexing for the target drive might help to increase the copying speed.

System Preferences -> Spotlight -> Privacy

Drag your external drive into the list to disable the indexing process for this drive. This should avoid the additional read access to the target drive from the spotlight index. But don't expect any miracles from this.

 

[Chung123]

Thanks everyone for the confirmation and info. It just seems like such an inefficient use of time. I can't wait until SSDs match the price of rotational hard drives. It's getting there---I see 240gb SSD cost half as much as it did 2 years ago.

I will always remember that story about Steve Jobs trying cut boot times for the first Mac: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Saving_Lives.txt

 

[ITguy2016]

Thanks everyone for the confirmation and info. It just seems like such an inefficient use of time. I can't wait until SSDs match the price of rotational hard drives. It's getting there---I see 240gb SSD cost half as much as it did 2 years ago.

I will always remember that story about Steve Jobs trying cut boot times for the first Mac: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Saving_Lives.txt

Small file sizes can really slow down a copy. The following Terminal command would have been faster:

sudo dd if=/dev/disk1 of=/dev/disk2 bs=4m

Assuming disk1 was the source disk and disk2 is the target disk.

 

[haralds]

Thanks everyone for the confirmation and info. It just seems like such an inefficient use of time. I can't wait until SSDs match the price of rotational hard drives. It's getting there---I see 240gb SSD cost half as much as it did 2 years ago.

I will always remember that story about Steve Jobs trying cut boot times for the first Mac: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Saving_Lives.txt

It's in the background, so I don't worry about it.