Slow backup

[delaney]

I have a Seagate Travan ATAPI IDE internal tap drive. I am running Windows XP on a Pentium III motherboard with 512 mb ram and a 60 gb hard drive.

 

My backups are incredibly long--up to 7 hours to back up 15 gb of data. Of course this time includes Verify. What can I do to speed up my backups?

[awnews]

How are your IDE connections arranged? Is the tape drive (to:) on the same IDE as the harddrive (from:) as master/slave? If not, what other IDE devices are cabled with these devices as m/s?

[delaney]

I have 5 IDE drives on my computer--Two 60 gb Maxtor hard drives, one 100 mb

Iomega zip drive, one Seagate Travan tape backup, and one CD-ROM. All of

these devices are on separate IDE cables except the CD-ROM and the Seagate

Travan tape backup, which share a cable. The CD-ROM is the master drive and

the Seagate Travan tape backup is the slave.

 

I've got a feeling, the CD-ROM and the Seagate Travan tape backup should not

share a cable. If that is the case, should I then configure my Iomega drive

and my CD-ROM drive to share an IDE cable, and if so, which should be

configured as the master?

[awnews]

The important thing in your config is that the harddrive and tape backup don't share an IDE. I don't know if a slow and fast IDE device on the same cable (e.g. an IDE33 and an IDE133) will cause the whole thing to run slow or if the PC speeds up and slows down the IDE clock depending on the device being accessed (PC & BIOS dependent?).

 

I would think that, since you're *not* copying from between the CDR and tape drive that are sharing the IDE, that they wouldn't be a problem. I've used the second config you've suggested, putting a CDR and Zip as m/s on an IDE, since I rarely if ever copy between these two. I guess it couldn't hurt to try that. In theory either device could be m/s but sometimes vendors push to have their device one or ther other. Check the Iomega website to see if they want the Zip to be a slave.

 

Since you have 5 IDE devices, I'm assuming you either have a motherboard with an integrated IDE expansion or are using a Promise/SIIG/etc. expansion PCI IDE card.

 

Have you also verified that you're set up to "DMA if available" and not PIO on all your IDE channels. Under W2K/XP these are My Computer->Manage->Device Manager-> IDE ATA Controller->Primary and Secondary IDE Channel config options. This is usually available for the motherboard IDEs, but sometimes can't be changed (hopefully defaults to DMA) for expansion IDE channels.