Toppy.org.uk

[Geoff Bacon]

Not sure a USB3 interface will work a great deal faster than a USB2 one (I suspect it will be limited by the disk being USB2).

Geoff

[jimi]

My thinking as well, with that in mind I've ordered a dual drive SATA->USB3 adapter. Once it. arrives I'll do some comparative testing.
I do have a dual drive USB2 adapter, unfortunately it's 1 IDE + 1 SATA, it's pretty old and seen a lot of use resulting in the SATA connector becoming worn and is starting to intermittently lose connection as you noted that can be a right pain in the middle of a big transfer.
I use it fairly regularly and since all my current PC's have now USB3 ports and most of my drives are SATA a new adapter is worthwhile upgrade. I'll keep the old one for IDE drives

[jimi]

I bought one of these usb3 dual bay sata hdd docking station
Had a play with it the other day using 2 Toppy formatted hard drives and TopfHDRW
I was able to do a direct disc to disc copy of 21 recordings (and folders) total of 16.27Gb in 5 minutes, which works out about 3.25Gb per minute, that's pretty fast in my book
My "in use" 5800 has approx 230Gb of recordings so theoretically it woul take approx 70 minutes to transfer.
Also tried setting up a new (to the toppy) 1Tb disc, takes around 2 minutes for the Toppy to format the disc and around 7 minutes for TM to restore a snapshot. So all going to plan I could l replace my existing 500Gb disc with a 1Tb disc and have it up, running and all files transferred in under an hour and a half !! Thats miles better than any other transfer method I've tried.

[Geoff Bacon]

That looks very interesting Jimi and could be useful for my ToppyDiskMedic program should I get a spate for disks to recover (it would save all that faffing with cables). I hardly get anyone wanting a disk recovered nowadays (although I do have one coming shortly) - probably because most users have upgraded to newer devices.

Geoff

[jimi]

It was on offer when I bought it so just under £20, can hardly go wrong at that price. It also has a offline disc clone facility which I haven't tried, but suspect it won't work with Toppy formatted discs. I wouldn't use this method for normal recording transfers to my NAS, too much trouble taking the disc out, I normally do those by FTP and run it overnight.
If I go for the disc swap on my active 5800 I'll note how long it takes, might be useful for someone contemplating a disc change