Does CPU speed affect hard drive cloning speed?

[Jmpinney]

Building out a dedicated cloning workstation and I’ve never really thought of this before - but how much does your processor speed affect cloning? Clones will primarily be customer mechanical drives cloned over to an SSD via sata, not usb, via clonezilla.

I’m planning on just a dirt basic athlon 3000g if it doesn’t really matter all that much but I can’t really find information.

Whats your cloning/imaging set up and how long does it take you to clone a 500GB drive?

 

[Mick]

Yes - CPU speed definitely affects cloning speed - and pretty much everything else. But unless you're planning on sitting and watching, I don't see it as a huge issue. Set it up, click 'Go' and go find something else to do, preferably something billable...

 

[sapphirescales]

CPU speed definitely affects cloning speed

That may be true, but only to a point. I upgraded my main cloning rig from a Ryzen 5 3600x to a Ryzen 9 3900x (got it for free from a client) and didn't see any noticeable difference in cloning speed.

 

[Mick]

That may be true, but only to a point. I upgraded my main cloning rig from a Ryzen 5 3600x to a Ryzen 9 3900x (got it for free from a client) and didn't see any noticeable difference in cloning speed.

He's using Clonezilla. I've seen the CPU rate climb up using that myself. That said, any decent modern CPU should cope just fine. And of course, what ever processor you've got, there may be bottlenecks elsewhere on a rig. An 8086? Not so much...

P.S. I wish I had clients that would give me Ryzen 9's !

 

[lcoughey]

Not really, as the speed limitations are mostly controlled by the speed of the source/destination drives and the connection between them. Now, that is based on a sector-by-sector clone and not a file-by-file drive image that may require more CPU involvement to handle the file system reading/writing.

If you are using ddrescue or hddsuperclone it is unlikely that you will see any noticeable performance increase between an i3 and an i7 CPU.

...this is all based on traditional spinning hard drives. There may be more of a noticeable difference when imaging NVMe to NVMe SSDs, but unlikely enough to be worth the added cost.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Clonezilla by default will lead you to compress your image, if you use compression you're CPU bound.

This only applies in disk or partition to image, or restoring such. Disk to disk is pretty much straight up IO limits.

My bench box is an old Core 2 quad core 2.4ghz, and it does OK. Again the larger issue is the stupid slow SATA controller card I installed in it. But that's what I want, a nice gentle pull... it helps get data off damaged platters.

 

[GTP]

I use an Athlon X2, with 4gb generic ram. The motherboard has 6 sata ports 2 of which I use for the C drive and a 4TB backup drive.
The other 4 are for connecting the drives.
Doing 2 clones, images, or clone one and image another at the same time doesn't really make any difference in speed in my experience.
I also have several docks connected via the onboard USB 2.0 ports, plus a USB 3.1 PCIe card so in theory I could clone/image probably 10 drives at once.

Imaging seems to take longer than cloning however?

 

[sapphirescales]

@Sky-Knight @Barcelona Those systems are pushing 12+ years now. Aren't you worried about a spontaneous failure when you're cloning/imaging a failing drive? I mean, heck, one of my 4th gen i7 systems just died while doing a clone and it corrupted the thing and I had to start over. Thankfully the drive wasn't too far gone and I could try the clone again using another computer, but sometimes you only have one shot to get that data. I can't imagine using something 12+ years old when my 6 year old system crapped out on me. Lesson learned, I guess. I will never use anything older than 1-2 years for cloning again. Even if it's some cheap Ryzen 3 3200g system, that would be better than the old crap I've got here. It's just not worth the risk. I almost had a freaking heart attack. It ruined my entire day.

 

[GTP]

@Sky-Knight @Barcelona Those systems are pushing 12+ years now. Aren't you worried about a spontaneous failure when you're cloning/imaging a failing drive? I mean, heck, one of my 4th gen i7 systems just died while doing a clone and it corrupted the thing and I had to start over. Thankfully the drive wasn't too far gone and I could try the clone again using another computer, but sometimes you only have one shot to get that data. I can't imagine using something 12+ years old when my 6 year old system crapped out on me. Lesson learned, I guess. I will never use anything older than 1-2 years for cloning again. Even if it's some cheap Ryzen 3 3200g system, that would be better than the old crap I've got here. It's just not worth the risk. I almost had a freaking heart attack. It ruined my entire day.

I'm not worried. Its old but its solid. If it displays any odd behavior I'll replace it but I think its reliable right now.

 

[Sky-Knight]

No, I'm not. Because the drives are relatively new (SSD). Solid electronics don't just quit, and when they quit... they quit. There's no greater chance of them quitting than the brand new stuff. Something has to happen to make them quit.

And if the thing smells wrong when I run my diags on it every month, I'll swap it with some other piece of crap I have sitting around.

 

[glennd]

Imaging seems to take longer than cloning however?

Cloning copies used sectors only.

 

[GTP]

Cloning copies used sectors only.

Thanks for clarifying that. I learned something.

 

[sapphirescales]

Solid electronics don't just quit, and when they quit... they quit. There's no greater chance of them quitting than the brand new stuff. Something has to happen to make them quit.

Old stuff with more hours is more likely to die than something with less hours. BTW, my motherboard died...it was a 6 year old board.

 

[lcoughey]

@Sky-Knight @Barcelona Those systems are pushing 12+ years now. Aren't you worried about a spontaneous failure when you're cloning/imaging a failing drive? I mean, heck, one of my 4th gen i7 systems just died while doing a clone and it corrupted the thing and I had to start over. Thankfully the drive wasn't too far gone and I could try the clone again using another computer, but sometimes you only have one shot to get that data. I can't imagine using something 12+ years old when my 6 year old system crapped out on me. Lesson learned, I guess. I will never use anything older than 1-2 years for cloning again. Even if it's some cheap Ryzen 3 3200g system, that would be better than the old crap I've got here. It's just not worth the risk. I almost had a freaking heart attack. It ruined my entire day.

Why would you need to start over. The log should have a record of where you left off. I have a half dozen linux systems running on older hardware that would be otherwise retired. I use them to erase drives mostly, but they would work fine for running ddrescue or hddsuperclone, were I be short of channels on my PC3000's, DeepSpar's, RapidSpar and MRT.

 

[lcoughey]

Cloning copies used sectors only.

Not really...though it really depends on the program you use and how they define the word cloning. But, technically, cloning a drive is a full sector-by-sector copy, both of used and unused sectors. Though, I suppose you could say, cloning used sectors rather than cloning a drive.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Outside of the initial 30 day burn in window, electronics with no moving parts need a reason to fail.

PSU fault is by far the most common. We don't have capacitors leaking anymore... And I use junk until it quits. The machine on my bench is a whitebox I used t use as a daily driver. And honestly, I trust it to get out of bed in the morning far more reliably than myself.

 

[Diggs]

Cloning while downsizing seems to take a huge amount of time. Cloning 1:1 is fast.

I run Linux on a Core2Duo for bench duties with a newer larger power supply. I consider it tried and tested, not prone to failure. Sure, I wish it has SATA 3 but it's not really an issue.

 

[britechguy]

Though, I suppose you could say, cloning used sectors rather than cloning a drive.

That's actually what I consider cloning. It's only used space that matters. If it fits on the destination drive, even when that's smaller, you still have a clone for all practical intents and purposes.

 

[fincoder]

If the CPU does affect cloning time, only the single-core performance would matter. Often the CPU models with less cores have a faster single core performance.