External hard drives...

Yup I have one of those...

I don't think I have ever used the built in clone, since I have a feeling it probably can't cope with a destination smaller than the source, and my most frequent use is for upgrading spinning rust HDDs to typically smaller but massively faster SSDs.

Its a good device IME, and when hooked up to my laptop via SSD, makes a reliable and fast way to clone disks using Acronis or similar.

The risk of cloning the "wrong way" is still present even if you just use it as a dock. So in either case it good to pay attention to what you are doing!

but dragging it still has to do that

that's not what *Windows* drag and drop does

Which is why I was asking the question.

I'm a million times more experienced with computers than Chummy

and I haven't clue what CCC is.

The problem as I see it is that he's doing a copy from one USB device to some internal storage and then copying it out to another USB device

It's possible/probable (I have no idea how the internal connections of a PC processor work), that the read and the write use the same data lines to the internal memory and thus cannot be done concurrently. The read/writes out to the USB devices may even use the same bus (here I do have experience in a non-PC environment, and this is what would happen), so cannot occur concurrently either..

This is what is going to make it take the time. The aggro of finding the next partition for the file and or a directory read/write to find/create each new file is going to be a tiny overheard compared with the doubling up of the read/write time

You can validate this scenario as IME it takes longer to do a USB-USB copy than it does to manually do USB-internal disk and then internal disk to USB (ignoring the overhead of typing in the extra command).

of course you usually don't do that because you don't have enough spare space on your internal disk

tim

yup

backing up 100 GB of my holiday photo archive took much much longer than 1TB of my TV/Film archive

The thrashing about creating files that are less than one "block" in length, storing multiple files in each block, is a serious overhead in the former. With much larger files that each occupy multiple blocks, is negligible in the latter.

Sorry I may have misled you. Basically when you do a file copy, as I said, it copies it file by file; basically its defragmenting the files as it goes. Which takes ages but actually has the advantage that the copy is defragmented.

Having re-read your post, three and a half hours for a 1tb disk is nothing !

I didn't notice this before, but at a guess the disk is only a quarter or a third full ?

In which case, cloning would probably br little faster as you'd be cloning

Turnip will be along shortly to explain why defragementing discs nowadays is largely irrelevant. But you may as well anyway, when you have the chance.

michael adams

... ...

Carbon Copy Cloner.

Is it ?

There's a picture of one here, plugged into a laptop.

Paul

What, one of these:

and which appears to come with cables. I'm sure even Jim could manage that.

Nothing wrong with asking questions, but if you ask a question and get a load of questions back as a response, it's because your original post lacked enough detail to enable anyone to formulate a useful response.

IOW, it helps if you know HOW to ask questions. As my chum at CERN discovered. But then he provided no detail at all.

you will be happy then ....

It wasn't a question :-(

Well, don't treat it as an answer then,

Copying files to new disk is alimentary dear Watson -

Print off every individual file from the source disk and then re-scan them all, setting up your scanner to use the new target disk to save them

tee hee

This is Jim we?re dealing with though. He has a long history of asking poorly framed questions and then blaming everyone else for the lack of straight answers.

Trying to teach him to ask the right question is like trying to explain to Trump how to be a decent human being. Can?t be done. They both lack the relevant capacities.

Tim

How am I supposed to know how you lot of professionals require to be spoon fed in a question ...?

AISB, that wasn't asking to be spoon-fed, it was asking for enough detail to be able to give a useful answer. You didn't even tell us how much data you were copying, or how.

the post is informing everyone else that I wasn't asking a question

so I then have to tell then all not to treat it as an answer

What were you doing then?