Backups to USB Mass Storage Really, Really Slow

[Frank J. Lhota]

I have an 200GB external hard drive, which is more than large enough to back
up my whole internal hard drive. Using a USB 2.0 connection, I do back up my
internal hard drive once a week, but due to some weird problem, the back-up
cannot be done under XP in a reasonable amount of time. I have been doing
the back-ups by booting from a boot CD with disk copying software, i.e.
without bringing up Windows XP. When booting from this CD, backing up
everything on my internal hard drive takes about 80 minutes.

Now I know that under a multi-tasking OS like XP, you should expect a
back-up to run a little slower. In my case, however, a back-up of my hard
drive would take an order of magnitude longer. I just tried Norton Ghost
(one of many XP back-up programs I've tried), and Ghost reported that it
would take 14 hours to back up my hard drive! (BTW the backup program that
comes with XP is even worse: it reports that more than a day would be
required to do a full backup).

Clearly, the problem is not the hardware, since I can back up my hard drive
in a jiffy if I boot from CD. I suspect that some driver or *.inf file got
corrupted, but I don't know how to figure out which one. Can anyone advise
me as to how to diagnose and fix this problem?

--
"All things extant in this world,
Gods of Heaven, gods of Earth,
Let everything be as it should be;
Thus shall it be!"
- Magical chant from "Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi"

"Drizzle, Drazzle, Drozzle, Drome,
Time for this one to come home!"
- Mr. Lizard from "Tooter Turtle"

 

[John A]

A few suggestions

- Do a Disk Cleanup
- Defrag your source drive
- Check for viruses & spyware
- Temporarily disable antivirus / anti spyware programs while doing
the backup
- Temporarily disable all startup programs using MSConfig
- Try doing the backup in Safe Mode

John Allen

 

[Frank J. Lhota]

A few suggestions

First of all, thanks for the suggestions. I've now got a good lead onto what
the problem is.

- Do a Disk Cleanup
- Defrag your source drive
- Check for viruses & spyware
- Temporarily disable antivirus / anti spyware programs while doing
the backup
- Temporarily disable all startup programs using MSConfig

I tried all of these. They helped somewhat, but even after doing these
steps, I'm looking at a 10 hour backup.

- Try doing the backup in Safe Mode

I had problems running my backup software in safe mode.

The real problem was exposed when I ran the Performance Manager program that
comes with Norton Utilities. It showed that the biggest performance
bottleneck on my family computer is the speed of the hard drive. Looking
into the matter further, I found that for whatever reason, XP is *not* using
DMA to transfer data to and from my hard drive. That slows things down in
general, and has a particularly bad effect on backups.

So now I have to figure out how to get XP to talk to my hard drive using
DMA. But that topic (how to get XP to use DMA) should have its own thread,
which I will start shortly.

--
"All things extant in this world,
Gods of Heaven, gods of Earth,
Let everything be as it should be;
Thus shall it be!"
- Magical chant from "Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi"

"Drizzle, Drazzle, Drozzle, Drome,
Time for this one to come home!"
- Mr. Lizard from "Tooter Turtle"

 

[John A]

Very interesting - I will follow that thread.

John Allen