Hi all, I'm new here but have been using ghost since version 6, IIRC

OK, I've got two pc's.
The first is a socket A Asus board, A7V8X-X, with 1Gig ram, Athlon 1900+ cpu, Via chipset.

The second is a Abit, Nforce3 board, 754 Athlon64 3 gig cpu, 512MB ram.

With the socket A board, Via chipset, I get a transfer speed of around 900Mb/sec when I ghost the XP partition to another drive.

With the Nforce3 board I get 160Mb/sec when ghosting to a second drive.

The XP partition in both cases is aroung 3.5Gb & ghosting takes about 2-3 mins on the via board compared to 11.5 mins on the Nforce3 board.

I've tried ghost2003 & ghost 8.3.

Why is the newer Nforce board slower than the old Via board? Is it because there is more ram on the older board?

@ clanky


Quote:

Why is the newer Nforce board slower than the old Via board? Is it because there is more ram on the older board?

I can not claim to be an *authority* on the mechanics of Ghost and various motherboards--but my guess is that it is not the RAM amount.

More likely has to do with the compatibility of Ghost's ability to understand and communicate with the HDD controllers, so probably to do with the north and south motherboard chipset.  Ghost checks the ability to communicate through the chipsets and changes how it transfers data based on those checks.

Other variables are the HDD speeds (platter RPM's and access speeds), CPU speed, motherboard bus speeds, which direction the data is going (i.e. primary to secondary controller, or secondary to primary), and what file system is being used for saving the image to.  

On my system, there is a built-in IDE controller in the chipset, and a built-in add-on RAID controller.  And the speeds vary depending on which controller is being used, and if the data is being passed from the RAID controller to the std IDE controller or the opposite direction.

However, my speeds do not usually show as dramatic difference as yours.  You could look through this FAQ to see if there's any trouble shooting you could try:  Switches: Drive detection

I tried various switches but they didn't improve things. Also tried Acronis but this was slightly slower :(

Doh, I feel stupid now :)

This was my sons pc & it looks like he was fiddling with the bios. I set it back to optimized settings & all is ok. I'm kicking myself for not checking the bios first...

@ clanky


Quote:

Doh, I feel stupid now

Hey--don't be so hard on yourself!!!

At least you stuck to it--looked for reasons and solutions--and found the problem--lots of folk here have just walked away because it was going to take the *E* word to work through the process (i.e. EFFORT)!

Good job!

JFYI......

I find that the brand and age of HD's makes a lot of difference in the data transfer speeds.  Also, I believe that two HD's on the same cable will be slower than two HD's on separate data cables.

SATA2 hard drives are much faster than IDE drives.....like, by a factor of ten.

Good Luck,
The Shadow  8-)

NightOwl reported some interesting figures showing two HDs on the same channel are faster than two HDs on separate channels.

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1160114366;start=0#0

Also, imaging to a NTFS partition is almost twice as fast as imaging to a FAT32 partition.

TheShadow wrote on Nov 19^th, 2008 at 5:25pm:

JFYI...... I find that the brand and age of HD's makes a lot of difference in the data transfer speeds.  Also, I believe that two HD's on the same cable will be slower than two HD's on separate data cables. SATA2 hard drives are much faster than IDE drives.....like, by a factor of ten. Good Luck, The Shadow  8-)

All ide drives here, western digital jb's.

I timed how long it took to write an image to different drives, Ghost 2003

OS (3348MB) on primary,  to same drive, 2nd partition, took 3 mins 13 secs to write, 53secs to verify.

OS to slave on ide1 took 2 mins 55 secs to write, 54 secs to verify.

OS to slave on ide2 took 2 mins 53 secs to write, 54 secs to verify.

It didn't make much difference having the drive on different cables.
I'll have to try it with with the ide2 drive as master & dvdrw as slave & see what happens.