Media Tools Pro - cloning

[saggy]

Evening all

Im currently using Media Tools Pro to clone a drive which has some issues.
Its a 500gig drive thats pretty full and tryin to clone drive to drive.

On average how long would you expect it to take to copy? At the moment (2 hours in) its going to take 549 hours.

Is it the amount of data that makes the difference or is it due to the poor condition of the drive? or a combination of both?

And to ask a newbie question - what is the difference between cloning by using this software and using a hardware alternative?

Thanks again

[Vulcan]

Replying to just a few of your questions:

Is it the amount of data that makes the difference or is it due to the poor condition of the drive? or a combination of both?

Obviously a small disk takes less time to clone than a larger one, but in your case, such extreme times will be due to the disk's condition / behaviour. My comment in this thread is relevant to this topic:

slow-bad-sectors-t22179.html

Of course there is no guarantee that any predicted completion time by any software will be accurate, as drive behaviour can change (for better or worse) during the cloning process.

[SquaL]

Hi, you may want to also check out:

http://www.deepspar.com/pdf/DeepSparDis ... paper3.pdf, cloning-equipment-software-t6529.html?hilit=copyr, the-best-disk-cloning-hardware-software-t10396.html?hilit=copyr, deepspar-imager-t8933.html?hilit=copyr#p53374,
deepspar-disk-imager-yec-ninja-king-demi-t12430.html, procedures-for-cloning-sata-and-pata-hard-drives-t7850.html and deepspar-atola-imager-actual-comparison-t14962.html#p98892.

I figure since there is over 500 hours (which may change as mentioned by Vulcan) left you will have a lot of time to read (and there is more). Joking aside what drive model is this and what problems does it have, apart from what already mentioned? Are you cloning in reverse? Did you adjust read retries to minimum? Depending on issue it might be possible to make some corrections which will result in faster clone, but this to be done by someone with proper experince and equipment.

You may be interested to know someone here is currently cloning a drive since last summer using DDI. So even with hardware equipment, you will run into those really difficult drive, but software would be a lot worse in cases like that. I too have media tools, a great piece of software, since 3.3, but as you will find out hardware has a lot of advantages.

[dick]

You might want to at least adjust the retry counter. By default it is set to 32x so it might be a good idea to set it to 1x otherwise the drive might die within a day or 2. You might find after a certain percentage the task gets past the bad bits and speeds up but there may be more bads ahead as well. To get the advance control screen up you need to do 'Ctrl S' and change the time out settings. I can't for the life of me remember if this can be done during the cloning process or if you have to stop, change the setting and then continue where you left off.

[saggy]

Thank everyone

I had changed the retrys to 1 before I started but it is possible to do during the process. I have left the timeouts the same doing it 'forward' not 'reverse'

Its still dog slow so ill have plenty of time to read up on other tools. Im quite liking the look of DDI but its few and far between when people give me bad drives. Cheaper for me to outsource. Is the license for DDI transferable? If so I might get a second hand.......

[SquaL]

It can be changed during cloning.

[lcoughey]

One huge disadvantage to using a software tool like Media Tools Pro compared to using a hardware imager like DDI is the lack of logging. That is, if you lose power or have to restart the system with Media Tools Pro and most software imagers, you have no way of knowing what sectors you have already read and may find yourself manually tracking what you have and haven't read..., but that does not help with any skipped sectors and is still tough to pickup where you left off. With DDI, you should never need to read a healthy sector from the original drive a second time. There are lots of other features that DDI has that MTP doesn't that will likely decrease your mirroring time exponentially. We used to use MTP for our cloning...then bought a DDI system and have never gone back.

Yes, there are times when DDI takes a long time to clone a drive, but if it takes a month with DDI, it will take a year with MTP.