Speed to Clone with Ghost 2003

[Welshjim]

Has anyone made a clone image of a drive using Ghost 2003 lately?
What was the speed? I recently have made two--both at the rather painfully slow speed of 29MB per minute. Is that normal?
If not, any ideas for speeding this up in the future?
This is for cloning an image, not a Backup.

[Nix]

If you are cloning drive to drive, are the drives on different IDE controllers so as to avoid IO contention ?

29Mb a minute would suggest some sort of major problem as that's only 1.699Gb and hour.

My slow system could back that up in about 5 minutes so maybe your better off making a back up and then creating the clone from that back up ??

[Welshjim]

Nix--Thanks for the response. I am cloning from the System Hard Drive (C:\) to a USB External Hard Drive.
I would still like to hear if anyone is able to do that faster than I can.

My slow system could back that up in about 5 minutes so maybe your better off making a back up and then creating the clone from that back up ??

Yes, maybe that is something to try in the future. But aren't backups in a different format from the original--like in several .bk* files? I want the cloned image in a form I can read off the second drive.

[DrMDJ]

If that external drive is attached via a usb 2.0 (or firewire) connection then the speeds you're seeing are really slow. I would expect more in the 400mb/min (or a bit better) range, even using like level 3 compression with ghost.

[Tuttle]

But if any of that USB stuff is USB 1.1 (or "USB 2.0 Full Speed") then performance will be abysmal. Are you sure that the port is USB 2.0 Hi Speed? What's performance with it like from within Windows?

[Welshjim]

I have used another program for Backup to that USB External Hard Drive and indeed the speed, while variable, is in the 250-500MB per minute range. This program is Retrospect which came with the Hard Drive.
This performance would suggest that the connection is, indeed, USB2.0 HiSpeed. (The PC is also less than a year old, and the Hard Drive less than 2 months old.)
So it would seem the problem is with Ghost cloning.
Tuttle--

What's performance with it like from within Windows?

If you mean how fast can I clone by loading the clone image to the C:\drive first and then transferring to the External Drive, as Nix has suggested, I have not tried that yet. If that is not what you suggest, please elaborate. Please remember, my interest is in Cloning, not backing up as I might do using NTBackup.

[Nix]

Ghost images will be .GHO regardless of whether they are Full Disk or individual partition.

Of course if you do Disk to Disk or Partition to Partition then no physical image exists as such.

If how ever you do Disk to image or Partition to image then a .GHO file will be created.

If the image is larger than 1.99Gb it will automatically be split with the first part of the image being .gho and subsequent parts being .??? (sorry I've forgotten but will find out).

[Tuttle]

By asking about performance in Windows I was just suggesting a way to check the USB 1.1/2.0 thing. Sounds like all the hardware is up to scratch though.

[Welshjim]

To reset the stage, my intent is to wind up with a Clone on a USB external drive of certain files from the internal hard drive.
I finally had more time to spend on this problem and found this on Symantec's support site for Ghost 2003.
Does this say what I think it says?
"USB connections
The average rate of transfer over a USB 1.1 connection is between 20 and 60 MB per minute. For more information, read the document Ghost compatibility with USB cables. Symantec Ghost does not support a USB 2.0 peer-to-peer connection."
That is a quote from
http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT...st&svy=&csm=no

So Tuttle was on the right track, and it looks like I am limited to very slow speeds using Ghost (2003 anyway) when transferring from my internal hard drive to the USB External Drive. (Remember there was no such limitation with Dantz Retrospect, the backup program that came with the USB External Drive.)

I also played around with Ghost some more.
I found that a Backup ("Ghost Image") transfers about 30% faster than a Clone, but this is still only about 37MB/minute.
I also experimented with Advanced Settings (see attachment) which is one of the steps in Ghost Wizard. When I set "No USB Drivers", I was able to Clone and Backup (at the miserable speeds mentioned).
When I set "USB 1.1 Drivers", everything seemed at first to go smoothly--reboot, open in PC-DOS, then the special Ghost window, but it was blank and the hour glass showed. After several minutes of that, I finally got an Error message headed by "Abort: 36000 A General Exception Occurred". The details are in Ghosterr.txt, attached.
When I set "USB 2.0 Drivers", after reboot the PC-DOS window was all that opened, and with a brief message. It said
"Iomega ASPI USB EHCI 1.0 v.13 09May 2003
IDO= WD 1200BB External" (followed by flashing prompt cursor, which, however, allowed no entries to be made). (I presume the WD means Western Digital.)
So, unless I want to use Ghost while I sleep (and do not care what happens for six to eight hours), it would seem Ghost 2003 is not the program to use with USB External Drives. Nothing was said about that on the box when I purchased this program.
If anyone would like to comment--like whether the more current Ghost 9 does work with USB devices--please do. Otherwise it would seem the issue is Resolved--though not to my liking.

[Welshjim]

Nix--I was thinking about your suggestion

maybe your better off making a back up and then creating the clone from that back up

Of course, in light of my post above, perhaps it is not worth spending more time on this, but could you elaborate?
Were you suggesting I use Ghost to Clone the files to a folder on the same internal drive? And then move the Cloned files over to the USB hard drive again using Ghost in Clone mode? Or?
The more I thought about that, either I do not understand or something is wrong. Why should the cloned files be transferred faster? (I can understand that they might now be compressed and therefore perhaps there are fewer bits to transfer, but why should the transfer speed be affected? I am still transferring files from the internal hard drive to the USB external hard drive.)
But perhaps I did not understand how you propose the "backup" of the files from one part of the internal drive to another should be done.
Thanks for any further comment, if you are willing.