Recently, I had the opportunity to upgrade my web server. Actually, to create a cluster of web servers. To do so, I needed to make a duplicate of my original hard drive to place in the new additional server. I chose partimage ( a linux open source application ) to make my copy of the original.
I had an old usb compactflash card reader and a 16gb compactflash card — enough room for the data on the original hard drive. I started the copying process using partimage. It soon indicated that it would take more than a couple of hours to make the image and was continuing to increase the total hours. I immediately stopped the process and studied the situation.
Why so long??
The device ( card reader ) is a sandisk imagemate sddr-31. It is a usb 1.1 device. A usb 1.1 device has a full speed specification of about 1.2mbytes per second. I believe that if I had left it running until it had completed its summary of estimated time, it would have been well over 24 hours. I am sure that the computer’s cpu speed may have had something to do with it to. It wasn’t the speediest I have — only 500mhz processor in it.
I looked around my computer room and I found an external usb hard drive ( usb version 2.0 ) and hooked that up for the transfer device. It only took 20 minutes to complete the process using this device.
Not only do you need to know YOUR limitations, you need to know that of your equipment as well.