Windows system image copy takes too long to finish

[orfenegro]

Hi,

I was making backups of my harddrives to external usb3.0 disk with windows system image backup (i am using windows 11 but using old backup method) but it was taking lots of hours. So i changed the harddrives and tried to backup from a pci gen 3 nvme ssd (3300 MB read/ 3000 MB write) to a sata ssd (550 MB read / 500 MB write) so i expected to have speed values capped to 500 MB however when i backed up it took around 2 hours and 40 minutes to fully backup an almost fully loaded 1 tb windows system which according to my calculations is around 100 MB/sec. Is this value normal? I know having lots of small files may slow the copy speed but this result almost made me regret changings the drive. Is there any other faster methods to fully backup my system? I heard ppl are advicing macrium reflect. Does using an external program help or should i accept these values?

 

Thanks in advance

[BiotechBen]

Macrium Reflect is very fast if going between PCIE or internal SATA devices, anything over USB is going to be limited by the USB controllers on either side of the transfer.

[orfenegro]

1 minute ago, BiotechBen said:

Macrium Reflect is very fast if going between PCIE or internal SATA devices, anything over USB is going to be limited by the USB controllers on either side of the transfer.

Well the example drives i mentioned are both internal drives. Installed macrium reflect now trying but seems like this will give similar results. It started showing 1gb/s and then dropped to 500 mb/s and showing remaining time 3 hours also when i check it from task manager drives read and write speed change between 50mb/s-100mb/s. (btw i am now trying from nvme to nvme here which are both above 3000 MB/s)

 

[Mark Kaine]

22 minutes ago, BiotechBen said:

Macrium Reflect is very fast if going between PCIE or internal SATA devices, anything over USB is going to be limited by the USB controllers on either side of the transfer.

honestly its limited by harddrive type, hdd = very slow may take up to an hour, ssd = super fast might be done in under 20 minutes... using exclusively usb3 to sata cables and around 250gb of size. 

 

and yes, macrium seems really good, with options that make sense, i haven't used other cloning / backup software yet cause there is no need (except whatever is in windows,  which simply doesn't even work in my experience) 

 

19 minutes ago, orfenegro said:

Installed macrium reflect now trying but seems like this will give similar results.

well, it will mostly depend on the size of the drive you want to back up...(?) not the connection type or anything,  although i guess internal should obviously be faster than usb to sata  

[BiotechBen]

36 minutes ago, orfenegro said:

Well the example drives i mentioned are both internal drives. Installed macrium reflect now trying but seems like this will give similar results. It started showing 1gb/s and then dropped to 500 mb/s and showing remaining time 3 hours also when i check it from task manager drives read and write speed change between 50mb/s-100mb/s. (btw i am now trying from nvme to nvme here which are both above 3000 MB/s)

 

If you are writing from an HDD to a dramless SSD, it's going to be super slow, but going from a SATA3 SSD with dram cache to NVMe SSD with DRAM cache, it's going to be much faster.

[Kilrah]

In macrium reflect you might want to disable compression if you want max speed, otherwise you're going to be limited by the CPU compressing the data.

[orfenegro]

it finished in 3 hours 34 minutes

from 1 tb samsung  980 nvme ssd to silicon power 2 tb nvme ssd

is this normal?