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cloning (not imaging) speed -- Macrium vs DD
Hi folks
I'm talking about Cloning here not imaging which is a separate methodology and Macrium does perfectly with it (both performance and reliability wise).
However on Cloning Macrium performs rather worse on Windows than using DD on most Linux systems fairly significantly though
Testing on the same hardware with the same source and target disks the macrium performs roughly at 800 Mb/s or 200 MB/s whereas the DD method using parameters DD if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=64M status=progress runs at 320 MB/s which is over 1 Gb/s so a lot faster.
On both tests I was running the application from within the Native OS's --i.e not using a stand alone recovery type system.
Not sure why there should be this difference in performance since the functionality can't be that different -- both methods read a block of raw data - the file system type is totally irrelevantant - and write it to the target drive so no "OS" file system or I/O handling routines would presumably be needed -- just a BIOS call to the Disk controller. I think the answer might lie in the way you can "Buffer" the DD method by specifying the block size for the data transfer with the bs parameter.
Perhaps anyone from Macrium could explain a bit and see if there's an easy method of improving the data transfer via the Cloning method.
Imaging is usually faster since only actual data is copied - not empty blocks in files etc -- for cloning though you want an identical target disk to the source.
Cheers
jimbo
Last edited by jimbo45; 26 Aug 2019 at 02:44. Reason: a few typos