Backing Up Launchbox/Emulation HDD

[garrett521]

I am in the process of creating a backup of my Launchbox HDD (8tb) to an external HDD, using the plain old 'Copy/Paste' method and a USB 2.0 connection.  After the first 12 hours, the backup is at 6%, and my estimation is that the entire process is likely to take 9-10 days.  Besides the obvious of using USB 3.0 and or a HDD with a faster RPM, does anyone have any pointers as to how my next backup can process faster?  Would cloning have been a better option?  Are there third party copy/paste programs that are more effective?  What have your experiences been?  Thanks.

[skizzosjt]

the software is not the bottleneck, any third party program claiming they can magically increase transfer speeds is literally a scam/lies. stay away from any company pushing that BS!

HDD is likely not going to be getting over 125 MB/s which is not impressive by today's standards when considering NVMe's and the like

I've backed up 8TB HDD's over USB before and it does not take 9-10 days so you must have a horribly slow disk or something else is creating the bottleneck.

Even USB 2.0 exceeds the speeds of any HDD. USB 2.0 max is 480 MB/s. So, the protocol is not the bottleneck either.

RPM of a disk shouldn't impact much in this regard, ie difference of a 5400 vs 7200 RPM HDD isn't going to make a meaningful difference in transfer speeds

 

Consider this, and this aligns with my experience. This should take less than 1 day. Any calculator could determine this, for ex

 

Look at how slow your disk would need to be to predict 9 days of time! 10 MB/s !!!! lol if your disk is this slow it's about to die or has something failing about it.

I'd like to think your disk is getting better speeds than 10 MB/s because that is how slow it would need to go in order for this to take 9 days! 222 hours / 24 hours = 9.25 days!

 

USB 2.0 is fine until you get into talking about NVMe drives. Yes, technically, a decent 2.5" SSD could exceed USB 2.0 max rate of 480 MB/s (maybe getting up to around 550 MB/s) but it wouldn't be a huge blow to performance. So, point being here going to USB 3.0 would not be helpful. With the little info shared, I have to assume you are using slow hardware, a spinning platter HDD and though excellent for backups, they are nowhere near the speeds of various SSD's. But your speeds are still a fraction of what they should be!

A quick test would be you should connect this HDD via SATAIII (assuming it has SATAIII connection) and see if there is a meaningful improvement. Maybe your USB port/hub is messed up. Also, any chance you are doing multiple things over that USB hub simultaneously? Just because your motherboard has, say, 4 USB 2.0 ports doesn't mean they all have a separate controller. They are normally going to the same controller, making those 4 ports essentially a hub. Meaning if you are doing other stuff at the same time over those USB 2.0 ports these other tasks could be hogging all the bandwidth and forcing this disk transfer to run at a snail's pace

[garrett521]

Thank you for all the detailed info.  I took another look at the data transferred so far, and it looks like the 6% being displayed by Windows is the percentage of total space transferred so far (6% of 8tb), but the percentage of total files transferred to this point is closer to 19%.  Assuming this is because the vast majority of items transferred as of now have been hundreds of thousands that are very small in size, hence the slower speed per file, and that once it gets over the larger items, the transfer speed is going to increase.  Guess I will just have to keep an eye on it and continuously recompute an estimated time of completion manually.