Copying/cloning one hard drive to another

[eljainc]

Hello,

We have two identical laptops with 60GB hard drives. We need to have
an efficient way of having them 'synched' upon demand. I have used
Ranish partition manager to copy a hard drive to an identical one.
Does anyone know offhand how long it might take to do a hard drive copy
of 60GB? These hard drives are fairly modern drives (Ultra133 DMA).

Thanks.
Mike McWhinney

 

[Rod Speed]

(e-mail address removed) wrote

We have two identical laptops with 60GB hard drives.

We need to have an efficient way of
having them 'synched' upon demand.

That is quite different to cloning.

I have used Ranish partition manager
to copy a hard drive to an identical one.

You cant clone to synch.

Does anyone know offhand how long it
might take to do a hard drive copy of 60GB?

Varys quite a bit with what you use to do the cloning
and how different the two systems are before synching.

These hard drives are fairly modern drives (Ultra133 DMA).

That is about the least important factor.

 

[Peter]

We have two identical laptops with 60GB hard drives. We need to have

an efficient way of having them 'synched' upon demand. I have used
Ranish partition manager to copy a hard drive to an identical one.
Does anyone know offhand how long it might take to do a hard drive copy
of 60GB? These hard drives are fairly modern drives (Ultra133 DMA).

That depends what do you mean by "synched'.

If you need to create an identical (or nearly identical) disk copy from one
laptop to another, I would create an image of disk first, then restore to
second laptop from that image. If you have fast network, quick laptops and a
shared folder on a decent machine, you can create an image about 1.5GB/min
and restore about 2.2GB/min. That with full 60GB of data will make about
40min and 27min respectively. The advantage is that you do not have to
remove laptop disks for cloning.