Question Clone or copy/paste

[ingeborgdot]

I have a drive that is showing bad segments, and acting a little weird, so I'm replacing it with a new drive. Do you believe it is better to clone the drive, or just copy and past to the new drive? Thanks.

 

[Tech Junky]

One is more efficient than the other. Depends on the size of the drive as well and how much data you're moving.

I've used both options by setting up a new install on a new drive and then dragging folders over to avoid reinstalling programs. I prefer to simply clone though since it's quicker than sorting through which folders I need to copy over.

It comes down to the issue that's causing the need to do either method though. A failing HDD though is a good reason to take quicker action and a clone takes less time to do. Set it up and let it run. Go do something else and when it's done just take out the bad drive and put the new clone in and you're done.

Now, if we're taking about your OS drive for your system you're rebuilding in the other thread.... It could just be a chance to start fresh and import some vital settings and move on from the old install.

 

[ingeborgdot]

Yeah, I should have put it was not my OS. I just realized that. I could just put the drive in and copy from my backup to I guess. I've never had to do that before. I've never had to use a backup and copy from it, so that part is new to me.
My issue with the clone would be if it copies the bad segment with it? It is actually the current pending sector count that is showing caution. Would that happen?

 

[Tech Junky]

Either method is moving data not sectors. Well, cloning mentions sectors but, if it's not a faulty sector on the new drive there won't be an impact. If it's just data to data then just copy it over instead of cloning. It will use the new space more efficiently. Just have rsync do the copy and let it run in the background.

 

[ingeborgdot]

Copying will use the new space more efficiently? Okay, nice to know. I was not aware of that. Copy it is. Thanks again.

 

[mindless1]

I'd do it differently, first manually copy off your most valuable data, in case a copy of the whole drive is too much stress and kills it.

I'd also first try getting the data off the backup instead, in case some files are corrupt now. HDD can reallocate bad sectors but if it can't read them, the data that was on them is gone, so yes you could potentially be trying to copy bad data.

Last time I had that happen on a dying drive, the copy process slowed WAY down, like the HDD was making many, multiple read attempts. Sometimes it eventually read the file, sometimes not, sometimes it looked like it read the file but found out later it was corrupt, part missing.

 

[ingeborgdot]

Most of it is valuable, but I have a backup copy of all of it anyway. I would just have to restore it if necessary. I'll try copying first, and if I have problems, I'll resort to the backup.
I don't really think we are in a critical state, just a caution state. I have it on backup anyway, so if it dies it dies.
We'll see what happens.

 

[mindless1]

^ Keep in mind that what you copy over, might seem like it copies fine but some parts of some files may be corrupt, so I would keep the backup, not delete or overwrite it later because you're assuming you have everything due to it seeming to copy okay.

 

[ingeborgdot]

I got the new HDD drive in. I have been doing some things that require transfer from this new HDD to my NAS. The speed that it is now transferring is over twice as fast as the other drive was. It is rocking. Even if the other drives wasn't bad, I'm glad I got the new one. Speed kills.

 

[Tech Junky]

Good to hear. I usually get over 200MB/s on a single drive and on my raid closer to SSD speeds.

 

[ingeborgdot]

I'm not getting that. How do you get that fast? How are you testing that??

 

[ingeborgdot]

Are you getting that speed to your NAS as that is what I transfer a lot of stuff to? I tried doing it between drives on my computer, and I got 224, but between my NAS and my PC over the network connection, and I'm getting about 120. I was getting about anywhere from 60-70 and up to 80 if I was lucky with the other HDD towards the end to my NAS.

 

[Tech Junky]

I'm not getting that. How do you get that fast? How are you testing that??

I use a PC as a router/switch/firewall/NAS/etc all in the same box because off the shelf doesn't hit the mark for speed. The box has a 5ge NIC and the AP connects at 2.5ge to it. When I'm connected with wire is when I get the full 400+ out of it. Just using WD red drives and put them into a raid 10 for doubling the throughput speeds and adding redundancy. All running off the onboard ports without any fancy or complicated cards to deal with.

 

[Shmee]

I typically get over 400MB/s when copying/backing stuff up to my NAS. It is a Truenas. It has a 10GbE NIC, and the fairly large ZFS cache in RAM helps a lot. On an X58 board with a Xeon and 48GB of DDR3. I think the bottleneck is likely due to the whatever SSD it is reading from on my desktop, since many of them are SATA. I think if I copy from one of my NVMe drives, it might go faster, but I don't remember.

 

[mv2devnull]

Copy/paste means that one has OS up and doing who-knows-what accesses to the filesystem. More than plain read.
Clone usually implies that a one-purpose minimal OS does a low-level read. Ideally one pass, but rather thorough.