trying to find good deal on hd copyer

[Chess007]

I figured that this would be a good place to ask my question. This doesn't relate to linux specifically, but i'm sure someone can help. Does anyone know where I can find a good deal on a hard drive copyer? I.e. a hardware device that will copy one ide hard drive to another ide hard drive.

[techwise]

I dont know any appliance devices offhand. I have seen them though. Just to make sure, you know you can do this with any pc and a bootable linux cd.

m

[saikee]

Never heard of such a thing.

However one can buy cheap IDE hard disk caddies, UK price £5 or US$10 per set, and clone hard disks by a PC using a Linux Live CD. You only need two sets. One for the source and one for the target. Linux dd needs only one line of command. After you finish one target just remove it and pop in the next disk. Doing it this way you do need to power down to remove the IDE disk which cannot be hotplugged.

At 50Mb/s transfer rate a 400Gb hdd takes about 2 hours.

I would be surprised if any device can do it quicker because the maximum transfer rate for an IDE device is 133Mb/s.

Anything cloned by dd is bootable because the boot sector is copied too. You can specify the exact sectors or partitions to be cloned so as to save time.

[Chess007]

So, if I had two of these, one would be the source and the other the destination?
http://cavuk.com/product.php?productid=1605


This is what I ment by a hardware ide hard drive copier...but the price is too high for me, so your idea is much better.
http://www.keenzo.com/showproduct.asp?ID=650761&ref=FRG1

[saikee]

I know Ghost clones hard disk by a DrDos program which can be hard-coded into a rom to clone disks in a box. What is interesting is that an IDE cable is used meaning the transfer speed will have to conform with Sata. This program is so small that it can be embedded into the boot sector to be activated after a reboot.

You can clone one source USB hdd into another target USB hdd by just a Linux Live CD.

The dd command is just
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=32768
If both disks are external USB devices the device names just change to
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=32768

In the above I assume the input device is either a Pata hda or a USB disk sda. The block size of 32768 is one track size of 64 sectors times 512 bytes per sector. Without it dd copies one sector at a time.

I advocate the caddy systems because as they allow disks to be connected as internal hard disks to enable the transfer rate 300% faster. It will have the same performance as the copyer you want to buy at the cost of only US$20. You do need to take the hard disk out from the enclosure though but that is child play for the model you have shown.