External hard drives...

[Tim Streater]

Er no. He was after my time. Although my mate at CERN had the office next to his, kept telling TBL that what he was doing "would never work". Ah well. Missed an opportunity for fame, there.

[Paul]

File Explorer, look on the left for all the partitions to be listed.

Right-click the external drive partition. Do Properties.

There will be a pie icon, a circle with pie shaped percentages. That will tell you what part of the storage is used, what part is free. The design of the display and the graphic used, varies from one version of Windows to the next. This is just a quick pic to show you what the concept looks like.

That's where we go to get the "441GB" number I'm looking for.

Since it's pretty obvious your front ports are USB2, I'm guessing the drive is roughly half-full of files, and everything works "as expected". Capped by the 35MB/sec USB2 rate.

You can purchase USB3 plugin cards, for desktops. Both my computers here have such cards added. One card runs ~400MB/sec, the other one is supposed to go twice as fast, but I have nothing to test the second card. I run SSDs off those ports occasionally. The computer buses are a letdown for the add-in cards, and you don't get the full rate when testing. Always a bit on the low side for the addon cards.

But plenty fast enough for spinning hard drives. I'd transfer your files in about 1/3rd of the time, with the add-on cards.

Paul

[michael adams]

Use a "cloning" or "imaging" program.

Which you're presumably not.

When you simply copy the files, the computer first has to find each file which may be stored in fragments all over the place. Which takes time. With a cloning or imaging program it just starts at the beginning and transfers the contents of the disk literally bit by bit. Having first worked out how much date is actually on the disk and if there's sufficient room on the destination disk, This will always make it faster whatever interface you're using. Unless you've only ever had just one big file on the disk at least. If you only do this occasionally worrying about the interface is probably a waste of money.

michael adams

...

[Jim GM4DHJ ...]

that is what I was hoping somebody would tell me was available.....

[Jim GM4DHJ ...]

no idea what you are talking about....sorry

[Paul]

All what you need, is some factory utility, to make one that mis-reports capacity.

When a real drive of the stated capacity costs 30X what you paid for it, what's your first hint ? :-) Real products don't have 30:1 ratios on "introductory offers". The device if sold that way, would be sold below material cost, a sure way to go broke.

If you go to the local computer store and ask the guy for a 1TB USB stick, he'll just smirk a bit, because he knows what you've been dabbling in and got burnt. There won't be any 1TB USB sticks 3" long sitting on his shelf. The biggest one with good retail distribution is something like 512GB or so. Some of the legit companies make press releases for even bigger ones, but those announcements are mostly vapor-ware. No shop owner wants to stock those, because the purchase price is too high for anyone to be willing to buy one. He'd be stuck with a dud sitting on the shelf.

For the price of a 512GB USB stick, you could buy a very nice SSD instead. And likely get even more storage for your money. A USB3 to SATA adapter cable, completes the purchase. That's the cable I use here for my SSD drives. Using an add-on card plugged into a desktop computer slot, I can get sufficient transfer rate to remain happy. By using a plugin 3.1 card, I can be certain of getting solid 3.0 rates.

About the best transfer rate you can get, is around

1000MB/sec. That's an NVMe-in-a-tray adapter. Not very practical, but that's something an average punter can own. People buy those, to migrate an OS onto an NVMe drive, then plug the NVMe into the motherboard (needs new-ish motherboard). They tend to get a wee bit warm, and will likely throttle if they get too hot. The good ones come with a heatsink (making the whole endeavor pretty silly).

Anything faster than that, is not to be trusted. The standards people are nut-bars, for the stuff they're pulling today. USB4/Thunderbolt, complete with dead-end standards versions, dead out of the gate. Wait about five years, to see if anything practical comes of it.

Paul

[Ian Jackson]

I've used several free cloning programs (including Acronis and EasUS), but my favourite is AOMEI Partition Assistant.

I don't know if anyone has mentioned it, but when you do a simple disk-to-disk copy you can run into trouble if some of the file names (full path) are too long. Cloning does a bit-by-bit copy, and doesn't suffer from this.

[michael adams]

I've used Ghost since it first came out on floppy and have been loyal to it ever since despite changes of ownership buying newer versions as and when required. According to critics its been superceded so I'll leave the floor to others.

Another advantage of cloning is that it copied the boot sector which in the past at least copying couldn't do. Maybe that's the one advantage of Windows 10 that I'm sorely missing out on.

michael adams

...

[michael adams]

make that despite changes when Symantic moved developement away from Binary Reasearch, its originators in New Zealand.

[Paul]

Windows cloning software, will transfer your files, with a lot more linear reads. You won't hear a lot of rattling of the heads, because the transfer is done "in cluster order".

If you use any sort of file-mode Windows copying, it does it in file tree + alphabetical order, that sort of thing. Then the heads on the spinning rust drive, rattle like crazy. Which slows things down, due to seek rates.

Jims USB2 ports are slow enough, a lot of these details are moot and don't matter a bit. Only if you're transferring a million 4KB files, would you suffer the slings and arrows of file system performance. Lots of head rattling,

1MB/sec transfer rates. It's at that point, that cloning software is a metric ton faster.

The cloning programs aren't friendly enough for Jim. They ask too many stupid questions. Some of the products come with 150 page or 200 page manuals, and I don't enjoy reading those manuals either :-)

But if you're sick of how slow a Windows transfer is, there are solutions.

This is what I use. If I had to make a transfer of something gnarly, this is one of many ways to do it. Jim will need a nicer one than this.

I've made visual manuals for people, to show them where some of the controls are hidden. Click your mouse on the film strip, to zoom in.

The second link is the one Jim could use right now.

Macrium6_Backup.gif

Clone_Disk.gif

Macrium_Restore_CD.gif

This one still looks a bit too busy. Easeus used to put adware in their freebies, but have mostly stopped. You can sometimes find Wikipedia articles, which have a paragraph about how much adware is present. This web page still looks too "busy" for my liking.

AOMEI makes a free one. They used to spam USENET at one time.

Both the Seagate and Western Digital sites have copies of the limited-functionality version of Acronis True Image Home. Which is another way to get this sort of software. Those versions look for branded drives - the Seagate version looks for the presence of a Seagate drive, the WDC version looks for a WDC drive.

But Jim will be finished his transfer, before the download of this stuff is finished, so maybe in the future it might work out for some purpose.

Paul

[Paul]

Yes, it's called a cloning dock.

A guy in the Win10 group owns one.

It will do a disk to disk transfer all by itself. But, it transfers every stinking sector, so it'll take a while.

That's as close to banging the drives together as you can get :-)

# Unfortunately, not a full manual. I suspect it can be used to # USB-communicate with one drive, all of the time. So it can be # used as an ordinary dock all the time. The plastic inserts come out, # so the unit supports both 2.5" and 3.5" drives. You can clone a 2.5" # to a 3.5" if you want.

Notice there are Source and Destination slots. Don't mix those up! Or your good data gets erased.

Only buy a product that comes with a step-by-step manual for every stinking mode! The above manual isn't good enough.

There are other brands out there. Look for the manual!

Things that erase hard drives, should come with a manual! I don't want to hear stories about how all your tax data got lost or whatever.

I don't own one of these. Too risky.

Paul

[Paul]

Jimbo mon, look at the f****ng picture. Humor me.

Paul

[T i m]

<snip>

I do, not had any issues yet but I agree you do have to keep track of what you are doing. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[Tim Streater]

You're confusing me with someone that uses Windows. I do have Win7 and Win10 running in VMs on my Mac, but that's only for testing x-platform software that I'm developing.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

Yes I bought a new western digital 2tb, and let Windows back up handle it every sunday morning. The first back up takes an age as its a complete image of the machine, but the following ones can take as little as 6 minutes, and no more than 30.

This also zips things up to save space as well. It is powered from the usb its plugged into and very quiet. Its one of their Elements range. I set it up as drive R and made it a fixed letter just to be on the safe side. Of coursw there are third party back up software about, but none of them are accessible as they tend to do the back up not actually in Windows, but in their own cut down OS. Brian

[tim...]

Having done this some years ago,

I really can't remember whether there's a command to ask the chip how big it is, or whether you just hard code the value that you "know" you have put on the board.

Either way, just lying about it in the interface would be simple.

Thinking about it a bit longer, I think the chip returns back a model number

which you then have to use to "look up" the capacity

so again. lying about it is simple.

burnt in what way?

when *I* started to look for this item, I was genuinely unsighted as to whether it would exist or not

All I knew was that I had a 128 GB one in my collection that I had bought for a reasonable price (circa 30 quid) a few year's back, and that I don't normally buy stuff at "early adopter" prices.

So I assumed that 2 iterations of Moore's law meant that 512GB would be the current equivalent of that 128GB entry point and that ones twice that size would be available at early adopter prices.

But on investigation I discovered that these 2 iterations of Moore's law had gone missing from this market. (Having lost my connections to the business, I cannot tell whether that's also true at the component level or just at the consumer product level - it's definitely the latter in consumer products that contain spinning disks)

but what use would that be for a laptop where you need USB connectivity?

I any case the price isn't that great

90 quid for 1YB

I can but an external 4TB spinning disk for that price.

That's' fiddly stuff for the novice, though isn't it

[Graeme]

In message <ro48fb$jcc$ [e-mail], michael adams [e-mail]> writes

That is so bleedin' obvious when you read it, but hadn't occurred to me.

[michael adams]

The reason for that is if the primary drive fails for whatever reason, then Windows is toast as well. Before Ghost became bloated with extra features the OS and program would easily fit on a floppy and could be booted from the floppy as well. Of necessity. Nowadays it will be a USB thumb drive.

If you have a clone then no problem its just swapped in as a replacement. But if you have an image on a second disk, which is preferable as it takes up less space and doesn't monopolise a whole disk, then that can be reinstalled on a new disc in the primary drive slot from the second disk in drive 2 using the program. Having booted from the USB thumb drive. So no need for Windows at that stage. Windows should reappear, hopefully, once the transfer is complete and yoiu restart the machine.

I'm not sure how Windows would handle an image reinstall in those circumstances.

michael adams

...

[michael adams]

Showing my age again. The image could of course also be reinstalled from a disk in an external hard drive.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Its so bleedin obvious that it is a shame it is almost irrelevant.

In the case of USB external disks being backed up from SATA internal drives, we have SATA transfer speeds of 150MB/s to 600MB/s (thats BYTES, not bits) from version 1, 2 and Express versus transfer speeds of 1, 60, and 500 MB/s for USB 1, 2, and 3.

That is only exceeded by USB4 and later.

With SATA drive data speeds of around 150MB/s we can easily see that whilst the disk is the bottleneck, in internal apps, in external drives unless USB3 is in play it's the USB part.

With any operating system that caches its disks, it will have done all its seeking long before it smacks the drive with the data, and enough nous to sort the data before it sends it.

That is what operating systems do.

The short answer is that USB drives are mostly slow because they are USB.