- Mar 4, 2000
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Today, I ran my experiment. I have long been impatient with the time it takes to clone a laptop HDD using either a 1394 connection or USB to to an external HDD identical to the internal.
I bit the bullet and got a Vantec eSATA Cardbus PCMCIA device for the laptop, and a Vantec Nex-Star 3 eSATA external case.
I put a 160 GB WD Caviar drive in the Vantec case, and got it all up and running. I then booted with Acronis TrueImage 10's bootable CDR, and proceeded to clone the 160 GB drive in the laptop to the Vantec, and then back again.
Once the external eSATA was formatted and ready to go, the time needed for the cloning operation was 10 minutes.
Before, with the Firewire link to an external 2.5" drive was 55 minutes. That certainly lives up to the generally advertised 5X better performance from eSATA than USB 2.
I ran it again on a second laptop drive (backup) and the same story. 10 minutes for the whole job. This is definitely worthwhile, and for me, signals the eventual demise of external USB 2 drives. I have one, and it is going to go to the "war surpolus" shelf and eventual "trickle down."
I bit the bullet and got a Vantec eSATA Cardbus PCMCIA device for the laptop, and a Vantec Nex-Star 3 eSATA external case.
I put a 160 GB WD Caviar drive in the Vantec case, and got it all up and running. I then booted with Acronis TrueImage 10's bootable CDR, and proceeded to clone the 160 GB drive in the laptop to the Vantec, and then back again.
Once the external eSATA was formatted and ready to go, the time needed for the cloning operation was 10 minutes.
Before, with the Firewire link to an external 2.5" drive was 55 minutes. That certainly lives up to the generally advertised 5X better performance from eSATA than USB 2.
I ran it again on a second laptop drive (backup) and the same story. 10 minutes for the whole job. This is definitely worthwhile, and for me, signals the eventual demise of external USB 2 drives. I have one, and it is going to go to the "war surpolus" shelf and eventual "trickle down."