[Josh]

We are using HD Clone 3.7 with default options except verify and this thing is very slow. They are on a IDE Ribbon not a USB drive. We are transferring an 80 gig drive. Its crazy slow.

[Alex]

What speed does HDClone show? And what version of HDClone are you running: the Stand alone or the Windows Variant?

If connected via parallel ATA, speed should peak at ~60-70MB/s.
If it has only ~10MB/s, then there's probably a problem with the interrupts or DMA, and HDClone has to use the compatibility mode. Please specify the model and make of your computer in order for us to reproduce the problem

[Tony]

I am trying to use HDClonePro to convert a virtual HD to a physical HD. It is a VMware virtual HD and my issue is my copy speed varies from 10KB/s to 500KB/s not 10MB/s or anything close.

[Alex]

HDClone running under VMWare is a very special case. I assume both drives (the virtual and the physical disc) are presented to HDClone as IDE drives. It appears VMWare does not set up the drive's UDMA modes in such a way that they perform at their best rate with HDClone. HDClone relies on the drive settings from the BIOS, and apparently the VMWare BIOS sets up the drive in a low-performance mode. Typical installations under VMWare will later replace the VMWare drivers with their own (and set up different DMA modes), but since HDClone doesn't have drivers for each and every board out there, this is no option.

Try the VMWare BIOS and look for the DMA mode on the hard disks. It is also possible that HDClone cannot use Interrupts for these devices. You should see this if the CPU usage is quite high. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del and see in the Task manager for the vmware process. If you have one processor (single core), and the vmware process runs at 100%, then the interrupts are not available to HDClone and HDClone has to perform a rather time consuming polling. If you have a dual processor system, the cpu usage is 50%, with four processors, the cpu usage for a process which uses all its scheduled time is 25%.

[Mike Way]

I am using the free edition. HD Clone started out at 5~10 mb/s. It is been progressively slowing down to now at 1.570kb/s. It's been running 31 hours straight and says it has 25 hours to go. I am afraid to buy the faster version for fear that it may be as slow as this. The task manager is never at more than 4%. I want to stop it, but I don't know if it will restart from the beginning or continue on.

After two days it is only at 56% cloning a not so full 300gb to a 500gb IDE drive.

Can you help? Should I stop it? Will it restart from the same point if I do?

Help!
Mike

[Alex]

The speed displayed is the overall speed. If at one point HDClone cannot read anymore and time goes on, the speed declines, but the sector count doesn't increase.

Is this the case with your computer, i.e. does the sector count still increase (or very slowly)?

If the latter is the case, then there are errors on the disc HDClone has problems to cope with. Here the standard edition with the SafeRescue (which does only copy the sane sectors and copies the erroneous sectors in a 2nd pass, which you then probably can skip...) might help you.

If it is completely blocked (i.e. the sector counter doesn't advance), then there was an unrecoverable problem with reading or writing.

Here we'd need to know what interface the drives are connected with (USB, IDE, SATA...) and also what drives are used, and of course, what version of HDClone and whether you are using the version for Windows or the self-booting version.

HDClone will not restart from a specified point, if you break it.

[mike way]

Thank you for getting back to me. Today, it is now at nearly 56 hours and running. Yes, the sector count is SLOWLY incrementing upward. You mentioned that my current drive may have errors. According to the HDClone log readout, there have been no read/write errors and no verification errors. It's just running at a snails pace.

The configuration is IDE/PATA from a 300gb to a 500gb Western Digital drive. No other drives, usb, firewire or SD drives are connected. Disk Manager shows the old drive and another WD digital utility sees the new drive, but list it as unformatted and unallocated.

I am going crazy here; do you advise that I just let it run till completion? Should I stop it. BTW, i ran CHKDSK /F before I started and the old DOS utility found nothing remarkable. Lastly, is it normal for HDClone to hog all resources? While running virtually any other application stops. I have been running HDClone as the only app to help speed things along. I've killed most taskbar activities in the msconfig startup dialogues. On occasion I have to check email and that's when I notice that the system is unresponsive. If you need any additional info to help you help me solve this situation, please post and/or advise.


thanks

[Alex]

This is odd. I usually only know of very slow operation with USB drives (if there are errors). I'll have to ask back with the developers to see if there's any explanation for this.

As far as I can tell, you could start all over again and see if this time the driver behaves better.
With the standard edition you could use smart copy, which would reduce the amount of data to copy to only the used sectors (so not anymore 300GB, but most likely less data), and with the professional edition you could start copying, and jot down the sector number where the system slows down, and start again at this position (with hopefully the same speed).

What is still not clear, if you're running under Windows (not the self-booting version), the driver thing should not really be of an issue, since this is all managed my Windows. You might not be able to see anything on the disk from disk manager, because the first sector (the one containing the partitioning information) is only written at the end to not confuse windows during copying with a half-finished partition.

[JohnMcC]

I have used HDclone a few times now. I find that if it slows down for the first five minutes, I restart and try a different combination of advanced options. That is DMA, IRQ etc, until I get one that works without slowing to these ridiculous speeds I too have seen. It appears to me as if the buffer (which is only 512k) slowly fills up and the effective transfer bite gets smaller and smaller.

[Alex]

The mentioned buffer of 512 KB is the direct DMA memory. Hard disks allow reading a multitude of sectors at once, but usually only up to 256 sectors. Since One sector is 512 byte in size, this means that one read or write command will only use up to 128KB. Since HDClone though can will do overlapping read and writes (one part is written while the next is already read), more than 128 KB are used. Since the data gets immediately written to the disc after reading, not more than the 512K are ever needed.

If one copies from one part of one disc to another part on the same disk though, the hard disk would have to reposition the head after each read and before each write, this is why HDClone uses at this point a buffer of 4MB in size, so the programm will do a read for 4MB and then a write for 4MB, with no head repositioning in the time between.

The problem with the very slow data rate is usually with faulty disks (or at least the driver thinks the disk is faulty) and therefore retries to read certain sectors, which has drastic impact on the speed.

Another problem is that the speed shown is averaged over the entire run, so if you started with 100MB/s in the first minute and then there's no progress anymore, after two minutes HDClone will still show 50MB/s, after 4 minutes it will show 25MB/s, and so on. We will change the speed indicator to a better version which shows the speed of say the last few seconds, which will deliver much more realistic transfer speeds. Only at the end the averaged speed is again of importance.