Started out around 1GB/Min, dropped to 755MB/Min at the end. (40.5 min for 30500 MB).

Is it me, or does this seem slow?

Using version 11 in DOS,
doing a partition to partition ghost from
IDE2, partition 1, 30GB of data NTFS
to
IDE1, partition 2, set for 40GB of space and NTFS

From is a generic 7200rpm (looks like a Quantum) to a WD 2500JB.  Mobo is Shuttle XPC SB51G (845g). 80pin cabling. Used intel diagnostic and saw that drives were set for udma-5.

Source drive was defragged several times prior to copy (and after removing some big deadwood download files)

1 gig /min seems decent.

Rad wrote on Mar 30^th, 2007 at 5:33pm:

1 gig /min seems decent.

It's definitely OK. 1Gb/min corresponds to about 17Mbyte/sec which isn't bad at all - in fact, it's excellent for a commodity drive on an IDE interface. This article shows a realistic sustained write throughput, properly measured using HDTach (for a SATA drive, but it's still a good comparison) - given the amount of data Ghost moves, you should be looking at the sustained write throughput on a drive to set your expectations, and not look at burst or cached measurements.

By the way, just as a bit of background on this aspect of HDD performance, it's worth noting the relationship between sustained throughput and areal density. At a given RPM a certain amount of hard-disk surface is swept by the heads per second, and if the resulting linear density is lower than the interface can deliver then that's what will constrain the sustained throughput.

That's what is so impressive about the new recording technologies such as those in the 750Gb Seagates - the aren't just big, they have extremely impressive throughput figures, which is no accident. Their increased capacity comes from a jump in areal density, which results in a jump in the swept linear density, hence better sustained throughput.

Of course, as with RAM the rate of capacity increase and the rate of throughput increase show different growth rates, and that has long-term consequences for the design of equipment. The inevitable result (as happens in every storage technology since the dawn of time) being the introduction of an additional tier of cache with intermediate performance, viz. "hybrid drives".

Concerning Reply #3 . . .


Quote:

With the introduction of the Barracuda 7200.10, the hard drive industry saw the biggest capacity jump in its 50-year history – a 50 percent leap from the previous high of 500GB.  Seagate used perpendicular recording technology to achieve the milestone.  The technology stands data bits vertically onto the disc media, rather than horizontal to the surface as with traditional longitudinal recording, to deliver new levels of hard drive data density, capacity and reliability.  The new data orientation also increases drive throughput without increasing spin speed by allowing more data bits to pass under the drive head in the same amount of time. Seagate uses perpendicular recording technology in all of its new desktop, notebook, enterprise, consumer electronics and retail hard drives.

Source:  Seagate's 750GB Desktop Hard Drive