I need to be able to duplicate an external USB hard drive (not flash) to multiple external USB hard drives (not flash) simultanously. Does anyone know a good USB duplicator that also supports USB hard drives with large capacity?
I found one from Kanguru, but when speaking with the company, it seems the device is not meant to work with USB hard drives. For example, it won't work with 500 GB drives…
Also, I do not want to have to open up the external drives enclosures to extract the hard drive and use a standard IDE or SATA duplicator… Waste of time…
You may want to try with Verity Systems
They have the Meteor systems. Not sure that they will do IDE or SATA.
Greetings,
Even a well known USB write blocker doesn't work well with USB drives. Their tech support confirmed that it was designed for small USB devices.
Any chance you can pull the drives from their current enclosures and temporarily connect them via some other interface? It'll go a lot faster, too.
-David
Hi Kovar,
I'm not looking for a USB write blocker but a duplicator…
And as I mentioned, I do not want to remove the drive from the USB enclosure because it's a big waste of time, there is a risk of damaging the enclosure and my users don't have the knowledge/ability to correctly pry open those enclosures.
Greetings,
I understand, I just used the write blocker as an example that there is a similar problem in the write blocker space with using USB interface products with larger devices.
I wasn't aware that this was for end user use.
The amount of time you spend opening the cases up could be saved in the time required to duplicate the drives when you take interface speeds into account.
Get a USB hub, plug all the drives into it, and run a Robocopy script to copy the source drive to all of the destination drives.
-David
I think you have a serious technical limitation, even with USB 2.0.
Not considering the overhead speed degradation of the drive, the OS, the software, your top speed is at 480Mb/s.
Not counting the error checking etc, that is 1MB/s. For a small 80GB (81,920MB) drive it would take 81,920 seconds…
Which is why I hate to "image" a drive using USB tools. SATA goes 1.5Gb/s to 6Gb/s, and even earlier PATA offers 16MB/s.
But, since you sound like someone set on this, look at NexCopy USB duplicator.