how many hours does it take to copy HR10's 750GB drive to another 750GB?(82 HD hours)

[Leila]

I think my my 2-month-old 750gb drive is about to fail... it's making a strange
high-pitch screeching noise. I have already ordered another 750gb and it will
be here in a few days.

There are currently 82 hours(give or take a few) of HD stuff on this HR10 right
now. How many hours will it take for me to copy the entire contents to the new
750GB drive? Any estimates?

Also, is it normal to have a Seagate 750gb drive go bad in just two months?

Thanks!

[JimSpence]

I think the Seagate should still be under warranty. As for the time to transfer, it will depend on the data transfer rate.

[bpratt]

Seagate drives are normally very reliable, but it is possible to get a lemon. I would guess your copy will run 24 hours or more for that much data.

[litzdog911]

It really depends on your PC and its IDE interface capabilities. One older PC that I tried copying/preserving my recordings from the original 250GB to an upgraded 400GB drive would have taken about 4 days. I wasn't willing to wait that long, so tried a newer PC, then it only took a few hours.

[rminsk]

Make sure that you put the two drives on different IDE channels when you make the copy. Try to delete as much of the programming off of the old drive before you make the copy unless you plan to use dd to make the copy and not the mfstools.

[SevronD]

FWIW: I used 'dd' from linux and my 250GB drive took about 5.5 hours. The transfer rate was about 13.6Mbytes / second.

So, a 750GB drive at this same speed should take about 16.5 hours(!).

I tried various block size settings and ended up choosing about 1MByte per block but other settings seemed to run at the same speed.

If you use the mfstools and don't save the programs it will be *much* faster.

[thepackfan]

I just want to restate what rminsk said Separate IDE Chains.

[jor-el]

my recollection was that on an athlon64-3500 and DMA turned on, it was only 2 hours for a 250. But lose DMA, and it's an eternity. Using mfstools and its nice status updates.

[Nomarian]

I concur. Make sure that DMA is turned ON for each drive.

[rminsk]

BTW, DMA mode can be checked and set with "hdparm"

[DrBunsen]

Yes, using different channels is important, but I concur about checking DMA. I'd rather use DMA on a single IDE channel than PIO on different channels.

If the Linux boot disk you use can't recognize the chipset on your PC then it'll revert to PIO instead of the much faster DMA. I kept some older PCs around that the PVT and Tiger tools disks recognize. Using my 3GHz P4 PC (with a Soyo motherboard) a copy of the 250GB drive would take way more than a day, but on the old Dells (866MHz) it only took (if I recall correctly) about 5 hours.

[kroddy]

On seperate channels with DMA enabled on both drives it took me ~2.5 hours to copy my "full" original 250GB drive to my 750 - the previous week I had upgraded my RCA using and it took almost twelve hours to copy the 40GB on the same machine with both drives on the same channel without enabling DMA - so, multiplying those figures out, if you do it right, maybe about 7.5 hours, get it wrong and it could take more than a week !!!

[rmcelwee]

Can someone give me a command line for running dd for a backup like this (entire drive copy). Right now I am using:
dd if=/dev/hdb of=/dev/hdc bs=8M progress=1

and it is taking an eternity to copy one 320GB drive to another 320GB drive. I'm sure it is because I don't have DMA turned on but I am unsure of how to turn it on.