Windows 10: Why is 275GB macrium image backup taking over 3 hrs to create & verify

@provlima Some more history for you : !!!

It wasn't that they would have been forgotten - but at the end of WWII the USA and GB almost came to blows against each other !! and there was absolute paranoia about this new technology - cyber cracking, cryptography and electronic switching - the basis for computers. GB was way ahead of USA in this area at that time so a lot of the stuff people like Flowers did had to remain as Govt secrets -- some of the work done at Bletchley Park in England has only been recently released.

Bletchley Park | Home

How many Brits even know that in 1940 the UK actually invaded part of Iceland -- rather to the bemusement at the time of the locals I have heard though - eventually the base was handed over to the USA where it remained a NATO base for many years -- now it's the main International airport at keflavik.

Invasion of Iceland - Wikipedia

Anyway enjoy the history lesson.

As for the topic in question -- RAID 0 will speed up your backup by over 50% - the problem with any sort of optimised file compression for taking the backup on Windows is the appalingly hideous performance by today's standards of the NTFS file system.

SATA like all electronic developments is just another step into finding better and more efficient both in speed and power consumption ways of delivering performance. Anybody remember old IDE drives with those big grey ribbon things !!! thank goodness those are obsolete now (although if you have some really old desktop computers you might still see those).

Cheers
jimbo

 

"I repeat what I have said again -- on the whole it's NOT CPU speed that's important here - but how the I/O is configured."

what is meant in easier to understand terms what the above means. Pls explain the term I/O and how do I configure the "I/O" to maximize the speed of the backup???

 

hmmm...

I've written quite a lot of compression and cryptographic algorithms in the past and the filesystem IO is the least of a concern when it comes to overall performance. Just comparing calculation speeds of crc, md5, sha1, sha256 and sha512 shows that there is a HUGE difference and the biggest thing that matters is the CPU speed and RAM IO depending on how the buffer is implemented. If we start to compare this to compression algorithms then the difference is even bigger.

NTFS is quite fast considering it's a journaling filesystem. Comparing NTFS and EXT4, there's minimal differences.

 

I imaged my operational drive (about 500GB) off line using the Macrium WinPE version and it took about 3 hours to a SATA III hard drive. If I do it within Windows 10 it is significantly less (under an hour).