Hard drive mirroring

[devnulllore]

HI,

I guess this is a hardware question. I have a second PC that has a freshly formatted HD and I need to copy the entire contents of a HD on a another PC to it. What would be the best way? I was thinking of some ways like, crossover cable, Ethernet (100mb through my router) or USB 3.0 to an external and back. How would you do it?

Thanks,

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

Use Clonezilla.

[sc302 Veteran]

If you are just looking to copy data, you can slave the drive in your new computer, you can copy the data over the network, you can use a ide/sata to usb device to attach the drive to a usb port and copy the data, you can create an image of the drive using a pay for image utility which will allow you to mount/browse the image on what ever computer you are at that has the full version installed (acronis, ghost, easeus all come to mind). How do you want to tackle it?

[+BudMan MVC]

"Ethernet (100mb through my router)"

So they are on the same network already?? Then why are we having this discussion - just copy your "data" over, robocopy is your friend.. You would of been done by now.

Now 100mbit network kind of blows for moving large amounts of data.. But hit go, come back later.

Your not talking clone of the OS or anything?? Sounds to me like just data files.

Now if your nics on your pcs are gig, and your limited by your routers lan ports. Then either buy a gig switch, or yes directly connect them - 10/100/1000 interfaces, ie gig do autocross so any normal patch cable will work. Yes gig would be much faster for moving large amount of files.

[devnulllore]

"Ethernet (100mb through my router)"

So they are on the same network already?? Then why are we having this discussion - just copy your "data" over, robocopy is your friend.. You would of been done by now.

Now 100mbit network kind of blows for moving large amounts of data.. But hit go, come back later.

Your not talking clone of the OS or anything?? Sounds to me like just data files.

Now if your nics on your pcs are gig, and your limited by your routers lan ports. Then either buy a gig switch, or yes directly connect them - 10/100/1000 interfaces, ie gig do autocross so any normal patch cable will work. Yes gig would be much faster for moving large amount of files.

Ok, well yes it is just data and I was ultimately going to use the lan if no other "better" method revealed themselves. Yes also to the facts that each PC has gig nics and a I have a gig router, however, I have never been impressed with the speed across the lan using the router. Perhaps a crossover cable would be best. I have one anyway so I will do some testing before I start the transfer.

Oh and we are still having this conversation because I just love talking to you BudMan.... ;) I knew you'd give me some good options.

Thanks,

[+BudMan MVC]

Not impressed with your gig speed transfers? So these boxes are connected via gig, why did you state 100mbit then?

Your not going to find a faster way, other than directly connecting your 2nd disk to where you want to move it and copy. But how much data are you talking? I move TBs of data very quickly over my gig network.

With somewhat recent disks and even very cheap gig hardware you should see 50MBps, which is only about half of what gig connection can move. I see 70 to 90MBps over my cheap ass hardware and even to and from a VM.

at 50MBps you can move 2TB in less than 12 hours. Hit go when your done using your computers for the night, next morning should be done. If you want to keep them in sync, then just run robocopy to copy changes in files, etc. how ever often you want to do that.

if your not seeing at min 30MBps moving files - then clearly something is not right and we should look into it. Even if less than 50MBps we should take a look unless your moving 1000's of tiny little files?

I would test wire speeds with iperf or netio, etc. You should be seeing 800Mbps over your gig connection even on cheap hardware..

C:\>iperf -c storage.local.lan -w 256k
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to storage.local.lan, TCP port 5001
TCP window size:  256 KByte
------------------------------------------------------------
[336] local 192.168.1.100 port 22701 connected with 192.168.1.8 port 5001
[ ID] Interval	   Transfer	 Bandwidth
[336]  0.0-10.0 sec  1.06 GBytes   909 Mbits/sec

So that was simple test between my workstation and my VM NAS, in theory at 900Mbps could move files at /8 112MBps -- which is faster than my disks could read or write anyway.. So network would not be the bottleneck in moving files between machines. The disks would be.

[c.grz]

A tip if I may, if you're not getting the full potential of 1Gbps bandwidth AND you trust the data source I recommend disabling anti-virus real time scanning on both PC's while you transfer the data. I did that with recently when both PC's were using Microsoft Security Essentials and I moved over 500GB at an average of 875Mbps as opposed to 120Mbps while real time scanning was on.

[devnulllore]

Not impressed with your gig speed transfers? So these boxes are connected via gig, why did you state 100mbit then?

<snip>

Uhhmm, oops. <shrug> I guess I just f**ked up on that one. Anyway I will go ahead with those tests and as I said I have I have a crossover cable. I will exhaust what I know for tests until the new system is ready.

Thanks again for all the help! You always come through. Should I just call the "BudMan" phone next time or use the "BudMan signal"? LOL

Cheers,

[stumper66]

If both PCs are gigabit network cards, you don't need a cross-over cable; any network will work. With 1GB NICs, they auto-negotiate to cross-over cables are obsolete.