Some PC Questions

Discussion in 'BS Forum' started by JetsKickAss, Nov 21, 2021.

  1. JetsKickAss

    JetsKickAss Well-Known Member

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    What's a good speed to backup data to an external hard drive ? I just got a new PC with SSDs and even though it seems to backup at about 2x the old HDD speed (240 gigs vs. 100 gigs per hour), I wonder if that is a decent speed or not.

    Of course, I didn't want to spend $500 on an SDD for faster speed, but wondering if my 1st new PC in 10 years is considered OK, slow, or what.
     
  2. Brook!

    Brook! Soft Admin...2018 Friendliest Member Award Winner

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    Not a technical guy but I hope our boss @Petrozza sees this and responds
     
  3. Br4d

    Br4d 2018 Weeb Ewbank Award

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    It should be faster than that.

    You're probably getting gated by something else in the transfer process. Maybe it's a bottleneck in your USB protocol? Are you using USB 2.x or 3.x? There can be a big difference there.
     
  4. Petrozza

    Petrozza Administrator

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    Sorry, I am no PC expert. I've been on Macs for the past 10 years. I back up to a NAS running a 3-disk RAID 5 array.
     
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  5. JetsKickAss

    JetsKickAss Well-Known Member

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    USB 3.0 I believe. I'll post the specs for my OLD PC and the New One later tonight or tomorrow.
     
  6. Br4d

    Br4d 2018 Weeb Ewbank Award

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    Ok, post specs of the device(s) you are backing up on also.

    If you're backing up to an older drive it's very possible that the drive speeds and USB protocol in use on the ports of that device(s) are the limiting factor.

    I have a couple of terabyte SATA drives from the early 2000's that I occasionally back up onto as a third option and those drives are very slow to transfer to.
     
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  7. Sundayjack

    Sundayjack pǝʇɔıppɐ ʎןןɐʇoʇ
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    Sign of the times - here I was thinking "PC questions" meant something entirely different.
     
  8. abyzmul

    abyzmul R.J. MacReady, 2018 Funniest Member Award Winner

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    Whatever it is, use the word "they" a lot. They like that.
     
  9. Br4d

    Br4d 2018 Weeb Ewbank Award

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    Ah, you boomers. PC is the secret pejorative from yesteryear. It's all about "woke" now or didn't you get the message? :)
     
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  10. JetsKickAss

    JetsKickAss Well-Known Member

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    OLD PC from Late-2011: i7-2600K CPU w/Western Digital Twin Mirror 1TYBTE BLUE SATA 6.0 (D-Drive)...8 Gigs DDR 1333 DRAM.....GA-Z68 MA 1155 Motherboard.....128 Gigabyte C-Drive Crucial SSD m4 2.5 SATA 6 GB/s

    NEW PC: Ryzen 5 5600G CPU......32 Gigs of DRAM DDR 4 3200 PC-4....D-Drive is an Inland 1 TYBTE SSD NVMe PCI Gen 3.0 3D NAND Read/Write up to 3,400 MBPs and 1900 MBPs......C-Drive is Crucial 500 GBYTE SSD M2 NVMa Interface...Tuf Gaming A4 microATX Motherboard

    The external hard drives are a 1-TYBTE Western Digital My Passport Ultra from a few years ago....and a 2 TYBTE Westerrn Digital "Blue" also from a few years ago.
     
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  11. Br4d

    Br4d 2018 Weeb Ewbank Award

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    It's the external drives. They're cutting the overall transfer rate by about a factor of 5. It's the write time that's doing it. That's what SSD does, cuts the write time dramatically.

    I wouldn't worry about it from the standpoint of simple backup operations. The external drives are storing the data you want kept safe. They're just not doing it at the lightning speed you might otherwise achieve.

    Your main PC is going to be much faster in terms of everyday operations and that's what you primarily got the new thing for, right?
     
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  12. JetsKickAss

    JetsKickAss Well-Known Member

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    Yeah, I'm not really into gaming so I stayed with the GPU that came with the AMD chip. On the old one I had a Nvidia 550 TI.

    I can see the faster work...even the backingup is at least 2x as fast. :D

    I did a Cinebench 11.5 test (there are newer ones but I like that older test) and the Ryzen 5 did a 20 score compared to a 6.8 when new for the i7-2600K. At the time, $1,000 Xenon chips were doing 11-13 so it's definitely a quantum improvement as would be expected given 10 years of time. 32 Gigs of new DDR 4 also better.

    Do you think buying new external HDDs or an external SSD for backup would improve on the 200-250 gigs per hour speed I can backup ? I have about 750 gigs that I normally do so at least now it's a 3 hour job not 6 hours.

    Virus scanning is also shortened by about 75% which is nice.
     
  13. Br4d

    Br4d 2018 Weeb Ewbank Award

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    You'd definitely get an improvement in overall speed, probably quite dramatic, with an external SSD.

    That said, large capacity external SSD's are expensive and I wouldn't make that purchase for that reason. I just backup overnight when I need too and the problem goes away because who cares how long it is taking if your eyes are shut while you do it?
     
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  14. JackBower

    JackBower Well-Known Member

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    I'm curious what you are backing up 750 GB daily.

    But yes, your external drives are the bottleneck sounds like. If you want way faster speeds and have some tech skills setup a NAS.
     
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