Enable write caching for faster drive speeds

[bjornpdx]

Here's one of those things that probably everyone knew about except me (as usual).

Windows 11 machine.

I have a couple of external hard drives (drives within enclosures) that I use for backing up and transferring video files and other large files. Sometimes it takes hours to back them up.

I just found out that if you enable write caching on the drives then the backups are much faster,  3-4 times faster in my case. But you have to properly eject the drives when you're done with them which isn't an issue since I've always done that.

Go to Device Manager -> Disk drives -> right click on drive in question -> Properties ->Policies -> select Better performance -> Enable write caching on this device

[JoeGBradford]

Thanks for this - very interesting! My full system backup to a 5Tb external Seagate HDD using the free version of Macrium reflect takes about 10 hours. I leave it on overnight and it is usually late morning when it finishes. So this would speed that up I assume. 

Reading around after seeing your post I see there seems to be risks involved if power is lost but that is an relatively unlikely event

Do others use this for major backup and what has the experience been like?

[pwalpwal]

if you have a crash, the buffered data is lost, but hey ho thems the breaks

[mettelus]

11 hours ago, JoeGBradford said:

Thanks for this - very interesting! My full system backup to a 5Tb external Seagate HDD using the free version of Macrium reflect takes about 10 hours.

This just stands out for me. The OS drive is the only one that requires imaging, and the others are really more "data drives" to the system. I use xcopy/robocopy scripts to update data drives (and copy newer data from C onto D). Setting these to only copy newer/modified files is very quick (after the first pass, which copies everything). Copying newer data from C to D takes roughly 10 seconds, and the data drives to external can take several minutes doing this. I keep my OS drive small on purpose (>200GB for imaging), so the back and forth (image<->restore) takes 12-16 minutes. When you said "10 hours" it made me wonder if you have done a restore, and how you protect files since the last image done prior to that restoration.

Data files that have never changed since installation do not require constant backups, more a "once and done" deal. Running drives through their paces can also lower the lifespan. I did a few write ups on this in both this and the old forum with more details on scripts and usage, but the "10 hours" really stands out for me... I have actually had several instances with removing programs or bad installs that doing the 15-minutes restore was the easier way to clean the registry (by far).

[kitekrazy1]

Most large external drives are 5400 rpm.

Not sure what is backed up to take that much time.  I would imagine it would if it were all of my drives with sample libraries.  I never back those up on a schedule. The only time they are backed up is after buying them so I don't have to download them again.   I've got a large collection of HDDs since upgrading to SSDs.  

 I'm not a fan of these apps that after downloading the installation files are deleted.  Some don't give you that option.  I get it if you have a laptop .  EW,NI, Steindberg are the offenders.   IK - I can download their zip files.  I can hold on to my VSL files.  I can keep al of my Live Suite files.   I'm getting turned off more by software the way  software is distributed these days.

[JoeGBradford]

Thanks for the responses - I tend to do a full system image (including data drives) every few months and that is what takes ten hours (I should do it more often though if I did it would be wise for me to take the suggested approach of just copying the data drives rather than creating an image with all discs on it). I just thought it best to have an image of the whole system but I take the point that I am probably wasting time there! 

Critical data files I keep copies of on a separate large external HDD 

[Amberwolf]

There's a bunch of ways to do backups, but doing a periodic full backup, then regular (frequent) incremental  "difference" backups is probably the quickest.

The only catch with them is that if you have a total failure, you have to restore the image, then each of the difference backups, to get back to where you were just before the failure. 

If the difference backups are not the difference from the last backup, but the idfference from the *full* bakcup, then you only need to restore the last difference bakcup after restoring the full one.