I’m trying to clone a 1 TB drive to a 250 GB hard drive. The source drive only has 52 GB being used. The new drive has partitions, but no data. The easeUS software has been running for an hour, and the estimated time remaining is going up, not down (over an hour remaining). I’m using a SATA to USB cord to connect the new drive to the computer. It seems to me that something has gone wrong, but I’ve never done this before.
You are correct that transferring 52 GB from a hard disc should not take that long (even under pessimistic assumptions it should not take more than half an hour). What is the software doing exactly, if it’s not a simple copy?
It is possible that the operation of resizing the 1 TB filesystem to 250 GB is slow for some reason (I have never tried the particular software you are using) and the bottleneck is not the USB speed; it is reasonable to expect 30 MB/s even out of USB v2.
NB if a disk has, say, 80 GB, then you can expect to be able to store exactly 80000000000 bytes on it, but some operating systems like MS and BSD continue a (non-standard but common) tradition of reporting disk usage in terms of “big” gigabytes, i.e., powers of 2. So your 52 GB may be slightly more when counted as “real” gigabytes to calculate expected transfer time, but obviously it will not make an order-of-magnitude difference.
ETA have you tried and does it make a difference if you plug both drives into the SATA bus, eliminating the USB connection?
Resizing a partition is definitely a quite slow process. Your files are not all in one easy clump. So the drive has to be defragmented.
When I’ve cloned using that software, a 200GB partition took about 6 hours to clone. Granted, this was cloning on the same SATA drive.
I’ve seen things like that take a long time when there are defects on the drive being read.
also it depends on whether the cloning utility is using a “block-level” transfer or a “file level” transfer. since you’re cloning from a larger drive to a smaller one, it’s probably file level. if you have a lot of tiny files, spinny disk hard drives can take forever.
block level transfer just streams the data as-is from one drive to the other.
It did finish, and I installed it and something was wrong. The computer gave me a blue screen error. I’m going to try and just do a clean install of windows 10.
Recently, I moved a 68 GB folder (photos) from my system hard drive to a 2 TB hard drive (almost empty) over a USB connection, and it took almost 24 hours to complete. This wasn’t a backup or bit-for-bit copy - it was a simple “move” operation in Windows 7 (64 bit).
I assumed that the USB bus was very slow, and I didn’t use that computer at all during that operation.
Maybe the USB bus wasn’t the problem?
Ideal transfer rates are never realized in the real world.
At work I regularly need to clean up our storage (moving files to a NAS array mainly) and 52GB takes waaay longer than 30 minutes and that is me with a connection through a switch to the NAS (i.e. no network congestion or multiple hops).
I am sure better speeds can be realized but not with your basic desktop PC.
True enough. I do have one real data point, though: recently I did a bulk copy of about 100 GB using a basic desktop PC, and an old one at that, from one really old hard disk drive to another really old hard disk drive, using SATA. The copy speed was just under 80 MB/s.
This seems to depend a lot on file size. A lot of little files takes a LOT longer to copy than a few big files even if the total amount of data transferred is the same.
As it happens most files on a PC are lots of small files so the total transfer rate will be low.
USB is most likely the problem, USB 2.0 is pretty slow overall. I regularly back up terabytes to USB drives and after I upgraded to USB 3.0 ports things were much faster. USB 3.0 ports are normally blue inside but they don’t seem to have been adopted widely.