External hard drives...

If you're doing a reglar, automatic, backup then the speed doesn't matter particularly. And if it's set up to do incremental backups, then each one takes very little time.

Proper computers come with that sort of software as standard.

As per a previous discussion on the subject (that I started), it seems that

It is vanishingly unlikley that Mr Numpty has just bought a new one, let alone already historically owned one

why should whether you dragged it or not, make any difference to a disk-to-disk copy. It only makes any difference for a directory to directory copy on the same disk

Well no, they are fairly common now

Well quite, but it only seems fair to ask, since the chances of him actually volunteering any useful information are slim!

ok, answer this:

Google maps tells me its going to take 3 hours to get to the office, is that right?

Hard drive lives matter!

my computers are road kill...I have been told...

be wurser if it was black slave and white master.....tee hee

Because you incur significant overhead on file creation - especially with lots of small files, when compared to say a disk clone style copy.

Also windows will also spend sometimes significant amounts of time enumerating the directory tree you are copying so that it can give you a progress dialogue with an estimate of total time - so that slower than doing robocopy from the command line for example.

Given the setup you are using, using something like Acronis true image[1] will clone one drive to the other faster than you will be able to do with a file copy. However the USB2 interface will still limit the maximum speed.

(for reference I was cloning some 120GB SSD drives onto new 256GB drives

- one drive on the internal SATA bus in the PC - the new one on a USB to SATA adaptor. Doing it with the new drive on a USB2 interface was taking

They have to be fairly sophisticated and computer literate to get the drives to misreport their size? TBH, I've never tried. Perhaps it's easy?

I wanted to know whether Chummy was doing it via D/D or something like CCC which I suppose might be faster, if more obscure.

Fine. But don't come whining to us about it.

Just bang the drives together really hard. That'll learn them.

You were clearly bored and asking a question for attention, rather than because you wanted the answer.

:)

It's clearly not fair, and you should write to Boris to do something about it. Plus, move closer to your office. That commute must be killing you.

Wasn't Tim Berners-Lee was it ?.

yes it was a waste of time...

Ballox