[voxelman]

I am very interested in using HD Clone Enterprise to build a hard disk dupllicator. The drives I want duplicate will be Seagate SATA (Barracuda 7200.10 family). Your web site mentions Adaptec SCSI controllers but doesn't identify SATA controllers. I am currently planning on using the 3805 SATA controller. Can you confirm that this controller is compatible with HD Clone Enterprise 8X?

I am also interested in knowing what level of CPU performance is needed to ensure maximum duplication speeds using HD Clone Enterprise 8x and this controller. I currently plan on using an Intel DG965OT motherboard with a Core 2 Duo 6600 and 4 GB of RAM.

[Alex]

HDClone natively supports SATA adapters with AHCI interface (either Version 1 or 2).
As for the 3805 SATA controller I personally doubt it will work with HDClone, since it seem (at first glance) to be a fully-fledged RAID controller, which unfortunately is not supported.

You still can test it it would work using the Free Edition of HDClone, since it has the same drivers. If a disk is recognized with the Free Edition, it also will work with the Professional/Enterprise Edition.

For the reachable speed you can also use the free edition: on the destination drive dialog you can perform a multi-disk speed test, which reads from all selected discs at once and estimates the attainable speed.

As for the RAM size: it is not important, HDClone only uses buffers up to 4MB, so 1 or 4GB do not make any difference. CPU speed instead can make a difference, but usually on such setups the PCI interface or the system bus is the bottleneck.
If all goes well (supported Controller either on the system bus (in the chipset) or connected via PCIe should allow the maximum throughput, which is the read/write speed of the disks. Only for the verification pass a fast CPU helps, as comparing the data in memory is still something the CPU has to do.

[voxelman]

I purchased HD Clone Enterprise 8x today and ran it on an Intel DG975OT motherboard with a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo 6600 and 2 GB of RAM. This MB has 6 SATA ports and my first test used 6 Seagate 80GB drives (7200.10 family). I ran a Multicopy duplication with verify of drive 0 to drives 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. The process required 45.54 minutes. My boss and I both concluded that we have nailed our drive duplication requirements for the forseable future. Thank you for your support.

[voxelman]

We attempted to use an Intel D975XBX2 Motherboard that has 4 Intel and 4 Marvel SATA ports. We get a steady stream of write errors that greatly increases copy time. The problem may occur because of some kind of conflict between the two controllers. For now we will be sticking with the DG975OT Motherboard that has 6 SATA ports and works flawlessly with HDClone.

[Smitty]

I would like to setup a cloning station computer with cloned images of all the computers on my network. So I can backup my drives on cloned image files. The computer that I would like to use for the imaged cloned drive files is running Windows xp. All the computers have ide drives. My first problem is the other computers have different operating systems. 5 computers have Red Hat linux. 2 computers have Solaris, and 1 computer has unix. Is this setup possible? I also have 3 more computers on my network with scusi drives. Can the scusi drive computers have a cloned image file of their drive saved on a Windows XP computer? Is this possible?