Copying/restoring Windows from SDD to HDD

[John Doe]

Using Macrium Reflect, I just noticed why a copy is so quick and a
restore is so slow. Copying drive C probably involves jillions of
tiny files. Solid State Disk (SDD) drives are known for taking
forever to write them. So the drive C backup from the 32 GB SDD to
the 150 GB Velociraptor HDD is very quick, but the restore is very
slow (an hour for less than 20 GB). So, if you had the money to
buy a 256 GB SDD drive and a huge conventional HDD as secondary to
keep your main drive copies, you might want to take a day off
whenever you do a restore.

Eureka.

 

[John Doe]

How do you do the restore?

Using Macrium Reflect, from a boot CD.

A file system type copy (create files one at a time using normal
operating system file-level calls) will be slow for the reasons
that you mentioned.

An image copy procedure that just copies the needed blocks will
go reasonably fast. Similarly, if you use a virtual disk (such
as for a virtual machine or an encryption disk), copying the
container files will go reasonably fast, perhaps enough so that
even though the entire container files are copied rather than
just the blocks allocated inside of the virtual structure.

The image is compressed, so apparently it must uncompress the
image. Maybe after that, when writing to the SDD, is when the
slowness occurs. The backup copy from within Windows takes about
1/20 the time.

I normally use Acronis True Image or similar products to "clone"
disks and haven't used the methods that make a sequential file
for the backup 5 or more years ago the restores where
file-by-file, which would be slow with SSD (actually, even with
spinning disks, but not as bad).

While I don't know method used by True Image and the other
current clone programs when doing restores from container files
to hard disks, 10 or more years ago, when I was using tapes for
backups, there typically were two ways to back and restore
disks: file-by-file, and "image" (which is usually called
"clone" these days.) Thus, the restores from using those
programs would run at full sequential disk or tape speed
(whichever was slower) Such a program would not have problems
with SSD's.

I have used various programs to make a copy of drive C since at
least Windows 98 including PartitionMagic and Disk Director. With
the exception of being slow to do a restore from the boot disk (it
might be better with the retail in-Windows version), Macrium
Reflect is by far the easiest and maybe the best technically. I
have done some serious disk gymnastics with it, including swapping
motherboards and using it on my SDD.

 

[Fishface]

Using Macrium Reflect, I just noticed why a copy is so quick and a
restore is so slow. Copying drive C probably involves jillions of
tiny files. Solid State Disk (SDD) drives are known for taking
forever to write them. So the drive C backup from the 32 GB SDD to
the 150 GB Velociraptor HDD is very quick, but the restore is very
slow (an hour for less than 20 GB). So, if you had the money to
buy a 256 GB SDD drive and a huge conventional HDD as secondary to
keep your main drive copies, you might want to take a day off
whenever you do a restore.

Interesting. I found this quickly, but it's a bit dated:
http://support.macrium.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=678

....suggesting the Bart PE rescue disk may be faster. I'd have thought
they would have fixed it by now if that is the case. I hate to see you
wear out your SSD in the name of science, though!

 

[John Doe]

John Doe wrote:

Interesting. I found this quickly, but it's a bit dated:
http://support.macrium.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=678

...suggesting the Bart PE rescue disk may be faster.

Thanks a lot. Yes, it appears to be faster, I guess roughly about
40 minutes versus 60 minutes.
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