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[redk9258]

I installed IE9 and it is faster than greased lightning. It loads pages before I type the URL in or click a bookmark. I guess it reads my mind or something. As a matter of fact, I did not even have to type this post. IE9 read my mind and made the post for me.

[DaveH]

I can already see your next post.

[Wolfy]

Yes, it was verified.  I can only think that data was compressed sufficiently to achieve this transfer rate.  Install IE9 and try Ghost yourself and see what you get.

[DaveH]

I feel ripped off. :(

I'm not even getting 700MB/Sec.

http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/8317/benchmarka.jpg

Oh well, it's only a netbook.

Dave

Edit- woops!  (how embarrassing)  I forgot to install IE9.  I better try that again.

[Brian_K]

Here is the bottleneck. USB write speed.

[DaveH]

I left my USB drive at home today so I had to "simulate" a USB drive with a RAM drive.  I figured usb and ram are close enough.

http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk?

But even at a sustained speed of 700MB/Second it would take me a lot longer than 2 minutes to write that much data.

Maybe it's my cheep Kingston value ram?

[Brian_K]

Dave,

Was your graphic done from a RAM drive? Can you repeat it with a real USB external HD? I'm interested if you get a similar figure to mine. 27 MB/sec write speed. That's the speed others get too.

Regarding HD speed. I thought SSDs do around 300 MB/sec but I don't have one to test. My SATA HD does 115 MB/sec. But my image creation rate with Standard Compression is less than the transfer rate of a USB2 external HD. That's why USB3 wouldn't be any faster for me.

[DaveH]

Yes, I was using a RAM drive for that test.  :)

I tried the benchmark on the external USB drive I usually use and I only get around 23MB/Sec

It's a Rosewill external case holding a standard Western Digital SATA hard drive.

I tried it on a couple systems and I only get around 22-23MB/Sec

It must be due to the little case and the little 39 cent imported chip they use.

Interesting how you say the transfer rate using Ghost is below your USB write speed.  I always figured that would be the bottleneck so I always chose the highest compression figuring it would end up being a little faster.

But normally I write the image to the hard drive and only occasionally copy some to the external drive.

I'm re-installing Ghost on my test system to try that, I usually just do cold images on that system because I'm always restoring and changing the configuration,  but it seems cold images are much faster for me.  Maybe without all the extra overhead it works faster. I'll try that too.

I never bothered with a SSD on my main desktops yet, I'm not going to bother until I get a new system.

But I think most of the good ones are around 250-300MB/Sec.  I put a Runcore 4 SSD in a friends netbook and it was around 260MB/Sec.

I also understand that some SSD's are switching to the new Sandforce controller that will give them up to 500MB/Sec !!!!

http://www.fastestssd.com/articles/sandforce-sf-2200-and-sf-2100-break-new-performance-barriers/

Regardless off the maximum speed, I think the key value is how good it is with 4kb reads.  Thats what determines how fast a hard drive "feels" and how fast it boots and works in general.   Most of windows is small read and writes and not very large sustained writes.

I'm going to try timming some Ghost backups hot and cold and to my hard drive and USB a little later.

Dave

[Brian_K]

Dave,

23 to 27 MB/sec is fine and Wolfy won't be getting a faster speed. I wouldn't like to rely on his backup.

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DaveH wrote:

But normally I write the image to the hard drive and only occasionally copy some to the external drive.

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Same here.

[DaveH · Accepted solution]

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Brian_K wrote:

Dave,

23 to 27 MB/sec is fine and Wolfy won't be getting a faster speed. I wouldn't like to rely on his backup.

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Thats why I was kidding around.  Sorry Wolfy.

It's absolutly impossible to achive that kind of write speed.   You can see from my test of a RAM drive, that couldn't even do it and thats faster than any SSD drive.

Hardware acceleration is a great thing.  IE9 can use the GPU to render graphics.  I also know that some password recovery tools now can use the GPU and fast graphic card memory to dramatically increase computational tasks.

But nothing is going to be able to "cram" more data through a USB2 connection.

Dave