Catalog Backup Performance

[pgreen7436]

I'm trying to do a full catalog back from Organizer. Going from my hard drive to a Western Digital USB 200GB Hard drive. It is now about 13 hours and only 72% has been done. Any ideas on what I can do to improve this?? I have already set the write cacheing, etc. on the USB hard drive.

[NickLewis]

How much material are you backing up? Number of images, space occupied, etc?

Nick

[pgreen7436]

How much material are you backing up? Number of images, space occupied, etc?

Nick

Nick,
I have about 1500 images @ approx. 2.5MB each, so 3 to 4 GB.

[NickLewis]

Good grief! I was expecting you to say some huge number.

I have about 8000 images, occupying about 45-50Gb. The last time I did a full backup, I just left it one evening, if I remember correctly, and it was done by the time I went to bed. It would have taken 150 hours at the rate you're experiencing.......

Is your hard drive heavily fragmented? Is the drive connected to a USB2 port, rather than a USB1?

Nick

[pgreen7436]

That's kind of what I thought... It is connected via USB 2.0 and is a 2.0 drive. I haven't defragged it lately, but it doesn't get a lot of use other than these catalog backups.

[NickLewis]

Well, mine's a Firewire drive, but I think that's actually marginally slower than USB2.0.

I don't really know what to suggest. If it were me I'd run Defrag, and possibly Checkdisk, on both the data and backup drives to see if the results of those throw any light.

It shouldn't take 13 hours+ to copy 4Gb of data across...... Which is all Backup is doing fundamentally, plus adding the catalog & version data.

A bit baffling...

Nick

[pgreen7436]

I have formatted it with the WD tools and will try a different USB port to see if anything changes...

[GaryK]

Waaay out in left field here.. :D

Did you add your USB 2 or did it come with the computer?
I added a USB 2 PCI card to my old computer but neglected to add the drivers and got all sorts of weird things happening when I used those new ports.
Turns out I had to load the software/drivers and then add the card.:rolleyes:

[pgreen7436]

Yeah, I even wonder about that, but these are all USB ports that came with the computer and Vista says they are USB2 ports. Western Digital doesn't have any drivers, so I used their format utility to put it back to "factory format" and it is faster but still only get about 2MB/sec throughput on it. I don't think it's supposed to be that slow.

If anyone has an external, USB2.0 drive I would love to hear what kind of numbers (throughput wise) you're getting for comparison. The drive could be old, although it's only about 1-1/2 years old...

[epaul6]

I'm trying to do a full catalog back from Organizer. Going from my hard drive to a Western Digital USB 200GB Hard drive. It is now about 13 hours and only 72% has been done. Any ideas on what I can do to improve this?? I have already set the write cacheing, etc. on the USB hard drive.


Is your catalog on a NTFS or FAT32 drive?

I also have a WD. It came formated with FAT32 file structure and my PC had NTFS file structure on it. I switched to NTFS on the external drive and my backup time improved remarkably. The WD site has instructions to do that).I also run fire wire as my connection source (because they gave me the cable and my USB 2.0 ports were filling up rapidly with peripherals). Not all the WD drives are the same. The premium (or is it premiere ?) have a 16mb buffer which do service the PC faster.

Another issue is how full is your external drive. My experience is that when they get about 80% full they tend to slow down on big jobs like backups.

Lastly how fast and how much memory do you have. Backups between hard drives do tend to stress the system as you are transferring data between 2 relatively slow devices.

[pgreen7436]

e.

At first, the Catalog and WD drives were both NTFS. Both ways have been tried. The WD was pretty full so I deleted everything, still slow. So, I formatted it, a little faster with FAT32 and fresh formatting. I have 3GB of RAM and an AMD64 3500+ (2.2GHz).

I started WD's Data Lifeguard Diags on this drive last night. It said it would take 18hours to run the full test. It's only half way done and I don't remember it EVER taking that long to run this full test. The last time, however, was under Windows XP and right after I bought the drive.

[GaryK]

Ok

Another silly thought. Did you get the Elements 5.02 Vista upgrade??

[pgreen7436]

Ok

Another silly thought. Did you get the Elements 5.02 Vista upgrade??

Yeah I did. I'm using it on my wife's laptop right now and it is going to take 10hours to do a full backup of a 20GB hard drive. Pretty poor. The first time I hooked it up and ran the diags on it, I got an error saying too many bad sectors. Powered if off/on and could then reformat it.

I'm afraid it's on it's way out. I've seen flakey behavior like this just before a drive dies. There are no Firmware updates/upgrades on WD's site so I think they either have or are about to drop support for it. :(

Looks like a 500GB MyBook might be in my near future. :)

[pgreen7436]

Update. I got the 500MB MyBook and hooked it into the USB2.0 port with the same performance problem. Other devices seem to be running okay, but It's hard to tell with them. The Firewire, however, gives me about 480MB/Sec transfers and has solved my problem. I'll wait a while and then look for updated drivers from ATI for the USB2.0 chipset that is in my computer. Right now, the firewire is running great!!

[epaul6]

Update. I got the 500MB MyBook and hooked it into the USB2.0 port with the same performance problem. Other devices seem to be running okay, but It's hard to tell with them. The Firewire, however, gives me about 480MB/Sec transfers and has solved my problem. I'll wait a while and then look for updated drivers from ATI for the USB2.0 chipset that is in my computer. Right now, the firewire is running great!!

I just did an update of my 7281 pic catalog on my WD MyBook premier 500gb and it took about 33 minutes. I use the firewire also. I am happy with the performance.