Fast disk cloning software/hardware?

[read error]

I tried using clonezilla to clone a half-full 256G SSD to a hard drive. After 10 hours it has cloned half the job, meaning it would take 20 hours to clone 128G. While cloning, the speed hovers around 170MB / minute.

I don't know if the speed bottleneck is the drives themselves, or the cloning software, but it is just too slow and this is just a test. The real drive I want to clone is 2TB. Using the above speed as an estimate, it would take 20 days to clone. So before I start to clone it, I want to find a faster cloning software.

Has anyone done any test between cloning software to see if there's any significant speed differences?
And if so, what are the fastest ways to clone large drives?
And how long does it take to clone a 2T SATA drive sector by sector, typically?

I see there are dual bay sata docking station /disk cloner selling for $30, like this wavlink docking station

Are they any good?

 

[lcoughey]

If it is reading that slow, there are likely other issues with the SSD and it won't matter what hardware/software you use to clone it, unless you are willing to invest some serious cash ($10K) to professional data recovery equipment, which may or may not make a difference.

If the data is of value, seek professional assistance before it completely fails. If you don't give a rip, image with build-in imaging functions in UFS Explorer or use ddrescue / hddsuperclone in Linxu.

 

[maximus]

I have used clonezilla in the past and never had that issue with it being so slow. You need to figure out why it is so slow. As suggested you could try ddrescue or hddsuperclone. Both are designed to work with failing drives, so they are a bit of overkill for cloning good drives, but they both do the job very well and show speed and estimated remaining time. If they are much faster, then it is an issue with clonezilla. And if you need to figure out if it is the source or destination that is slow, you can use /dev/null as the destination to rule out the destination as the cause. And if you find it is a drive that is causing it to be slow, then you need to figure out if something is wrong with the drive. If there is something wrong with either the source or destination drive, then a docking/cloning station will not help with speed, and won’t be able to indicate what the issue is, and will fail to clone if there is an issue.

If you are looking for a good docking station with cloning ability (for healthy drives), then I would recommend a Sabrent USB 3.0 to SATA Dual Bay External Hard Drive Docking Station for 2.5″ or 3.5″ HDD. I have one of the original versions and like it. It is not cheap though, as I was not looking for cheap when I got it, but functionality (claims support for up to 10TB), plus I have had good luck with previous products. If you do decide to get such a docking station, make sure to look at all aspects and reviews, and don't just listen to my review.

As for speed, it does depend on the drives, but my experience with 2TB was about 8 hours.


@lcoughey, for your reference to using UFS Explorer to image a failing drive, I have tried testing it a few times, and it sucks, it failed spectacularly. UFS Explorer may be the absolute best at logical recovery, but the imaging feature is still inferior to even ddrescue when working with a failing drive. Just saying...

 

[read error]

No need to send the drive to professional recovery service. While trying to salvage data from the corrupt drive using Gparted, I was able to copy files to a good drives, and I also found some files with ~filename.tmp that looks like the files I'm looking for. Googling tells me they are created by windows in the middle of file operations.

Copying ntfs files (both source and destination are ntfs) under linux is also very slow. But at least I have retrieved the most important files.

Thanks for the response. Now I have more things to try to get the rest of the files.