Imaging and restoring is necessarily a time consuming process due to the significant volumes of data involved. During the development of Macrium Reflect, we have focused on performance. However, the data rate will always be limited by the slowest link in the chain. For a modern PC, this is typically the source or target storage media / hard disks or the communication link. However, it can also be faulty hardware, leads or flawed/out of date drivers.
Typical data rates for a correctly functioning system
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Unfortunately, it is not always possible to turn off AV software or disabling it has no effect on the scanning behavior. Some customers have reported that they had to uninstall their AV software completely, before they saw a performance improvement.
Resource contention
Is your machine busy during the imaging period, with other tasks? The CPU and hard disks are shared resources, so other processes will necessarily slow the imaging process. Furthermore, the snapshot process is dynamic; to efficiently maintain a point in time view of the file system, as sectors are modified, a copy is taken of the original data. Hence frequent write activities on the disk being imaged can have a very significant additional performance cost.
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- Open Control Panel > Power Options (this can be found under System & Security for Windows Vista onward).
- Select 'Change plan settings' for whichever plan you currently have configured (a link on the right hand side of the selected power option).
- Click 'Change advanced power settings'.
- Select 'Hard Disk' > 'Turn off hard disk after'. Set a value of 1 hour or more. Having this value too low (less than a minute for example) could cause a hard disk to go into low power/suspend mode during a backup. This will adversely affect backup performance and the lifetime of the disk.
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