Macrium Reflect Free significant slowdown

ruggb · 15 Sep 2020

I have the latest update of MRF and I am imaging a 120GB SSD system drive with about 54GB used onto a clean USB2 500GB WD scorpio blue drive. When I started, it ran about 250Mbps and indicates 19 minutes, which is about what it has always been. Now it gets past the 1/2 way mark and is running 3Mbps and 14 hours to finish. I cancelled and restarted it and it is doing better. But at the 3/4 mark is is down to about 15Mbps and 2 hours. Previous operations never did that. What am I missing? Why is it slowing down so much past the 1/2 way mark?

Ghot · 15 Sep 2020

ruggb said:

I have the latest update of MRF and I am imaging a 120GB SSD system drive with about 54GB used onto a clean USB2 500GB WD scorpio blue drive. When I started, it ran about 250Mbps and indicates 19 minutes, which is about what it has always been. Now it gets past the 1/2 way mark and is running 3Mbps and 14 hours to finish. I cancelled and restarted it and it is doing better. But at the 3/4 mark is is down to about 15Mbps and 2 hours. Previous operations never did that. What am I missing? Why is it slowing down so much past the 1/2 way mark?

If it were me, I'd put that 500GB WD Blue inside the computer. You're backups would take about 4 minutes.

As to why it's slowing down, I have no idea. Is the 500GB old? When was the last time you ran chkdsk /r on it?
Is the 500GB getting full? Maybe the enclosure is developing a problem.

ruggb · 15 Sep 2020

Ghot said:

If it were me, I'd put that 500GB WD Blue inside the computer. You're backups would take about 4 minutes.
As to why it's slowing down, I have no idea. Is the 500GB old? When was the last time you ran chkdsk /r on it?
Is the 500GB getting full? Maybe the enclosure is developing a problem.

The SSD is totally big enough for my wife and it boots a lot faster. The WD came out of a laptop I replaced with an SSD.
It just never took that long on this computer with previous revisions of MRF. But then I may not have used that WD before, but it runs fine for a while. I'll run some tests on it.

Yes, there are some strange things going on with it. Chkdsk did find some issues and HD tune shows periodic longer read times after about 100GB, but no errors on the scan.

thanks

Bastet · 16 Sep 2020

I’ve found that at times - it will slow down then speed up. I put it down to it scanning/saving large files.

ruggb · 16 Sep 2020

Yes, small files go by faster, but take longer overall than big files because of all the overhead. HOWEVER, final analysis. bad drive. I was looking at the wrong drive when I thought there was no errors. thanks

Bastet · 16 Sep 2020

Good to hear you found the answer.

jimbo45 · 16 Sep 2020

ruggb said:

Yes, small files go by faster, but take longer overall than big files because of all the overhead. HOWEVER, final analysis. bad drive. I was looking at the wrong drive when I thought there was no errors. thanks

Good you found the answer.

I'd always do a test on a drive first before suspecting software like Macrium --IMO using its built in "Intelligent copy" for imaging it's always been extremely fast - even on the free versions.

If you do a "Sector by Sector" copy such as cloning a Linux disk then it will take a lot longer as every single byte of data =- empty or not - will be copied.

For cloning Non Windows disks (nothiing against Macrium BTW) whatever file system - just boot up any Linux distro and run the simple but very efficient DD command as root or sudo.

In fact sometimes the DD command will clone a disk faster than Macrium clone even for Windows disks - but for imaging Macrium IMO can't be bettered.

Cheers
jimbo

RolandJS · 16 Sep 2020

In my experience, any hard-drive, source or target, that has any hardware or software problem can slow the process, sometimes quite a bit, or, as often is the case - stop the process entirely, returning a "red flag". Ripley's Believe It Or Not: my internal USB ports on both the laptop and the cooling assembly have been causing problems both in Explorer operations [why - I don't know] and in backup/restore operations because external USB platter-driven hard-drives and USB flash drives were not picked up either normal or Safe Mode Windows 7.