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Date:      Fri, 03 Aug 2001 08:42:51 -0700
From:      "Kevin Oberman" <oberman@es.net>
To:        Christopher Farley <chris@northernbrewer.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Cloning a hard drive - performance issues 
Message-ID:  <200108031542.f73Fgpm19225@ptavv.es.net>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 02 Aug 2001 19:50:19 CDT." <20010802195017.A503@northernbrewer.com> 

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> Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2001 19:50:19 -0500
> From: Christopher Farley <chris@northernbrewer.com>
> Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
> 
> I've got a drive that started throwing hard read errors. I'm going to
> copy it onto a fresh drive. (Details below, if it's relevant.)
> 
> Using 2 ATA/66 drives, this has proven to be very, very SLOW. So I'm left
> with a hardware question:
> 
> Which is faster:
> 
> a) Leave both drives on the same cable, set one as master and the other
>    as slave
> b) Put each drive on its own cable, set them both as master
> c) No difference
> d) Depends on your mainboard

b) should always be faster (assuming there is no activity to any slave
device on either controller).

> Here is my 'cloning' process - perhaps this is just a slow operation: 
> 
> I've prepared my new drive with fdisk, disklabel and newfs. To perform
> the 'clone' I'm mounting the new filesystem on /mnt, and piping dump into 
> restore like this:
> 
> cd /mnt
> dump -0uaf - /dev/ad0s1a | restore -rf -

You call this 'cloning'. If the new and slices have the same geometry,
dd is MUCH faster. I clone my laptop HD weekly with:
dd bs=32k if=/dev/ad0s1 of=/dev/ad2s1 # Windows slice
dd bs=32k if=/dev/ad0s1 of=/dev/ad2s2 # FreeBSD slice

Note that the slices are identical, but the disks are not. (I am
cloning 2 of 4 slices on a 12 GB disk onto a 6 GB disk.) You can
further speed this up using team from ports. You can also use dd to
clone identical partitions.

I clone the 6 GB in about 13 minutes.

Also, make sure write caching is enabled. It was off in 4.3-Release
and will kill you on this type of operation. (It was on in 4.2 and is
back on in -stable.)

> -- 
> Christopher Farley
> www.northernbrewer.com
> 
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