Which is Faster? Copying 1-1 HD's or Copying from 1 place to another on the same HD?

[davidkay]

Is Copying from 1 HD to the Other quicker than copying information from one partition to another on the same drive? (Both will be on the same channel, i.e. Slave and Master)

Cause i couldnt work it out. If the drive is copying to itself on another area, wouldn't it take longer as its gotta keep moving the heads between read and write? Or would it be faster than if you were copying to another HD where it had to go through the IDE channel and thus causing longer time!

Thanks!

 

[CZroe]

If you know how a hard drive works, the answer is obvious (You're right):
If it's writing to itself what it read from itself, then it has to stop reading, move to the empty space on the other partition, write it, return to the data being read and continue the process. That seek time rating really adds up! When copying between drives, the speed is usually limited to how fast the drive being written to can write it, NOT your IDE bus. If it's not EXTREMELY fragmented (Which would have the same "seek" effect), it should go multiple times faster...

 

[davidkay]

Yep, Doing a computer science degree i should really know this. We went to it in depth, i just wanted to confirm what i thought. honest ;-)

 

[CZroe]

Updated above (Didn't sound right, I'd read again )

 

[CZroe]

Updated again! (Sorry! )

 

[GoSharks]

but since they are on the same ide bus, for each read/write cycle, the information going from the read drive to the write drive will have to stop once the write starts.. right? (ide can only access one drive at a particular moment on the same channel?)

 

[davidkay]

Good Point!

I need to know the answer to that too!

 

[CZroe]

Only the FASTEST IDE hard drives come close to hitting the 33MBps limit of slow-old ATA33 (IBM 60GXP hits ~28MPps) with sustained transfer rates.
The drive's controller will fill the remaining cache while the other drive writes and transfer the cache contents in a 33MBps burst when the other drive is ready.
This is why DMA is sooo ESSENTIAL.

 

[davidkay]

So Two drives on the same IDE cable will still be faster than copying to the same HD?

 

[CZroe]

Right

 

[thorin]

Right. Copying between 2 drives even on 1 bus with 1 drive being accessed at a time is faster then copying from a drive to itself. (The speed difference may be imperceivable depending on the amount of data though).

Thorin

 

[davidkay]

Now its a choice between a Maxtor 7200RPM or a Seagate 7200RPM? 80Gb!
What you think?

 

[thorin]

IMHO Seagate. I've had bad luck with Maxtor, however alot of people here do support Maxtor as well. In the end between Seagate and Maxtor it probably doesn't matter to much it's all personal experience.

Thorin