Ok a friend is having extremly slow backup speeds he is backing up vast amounts of data and takes an average of 3 DAYS!!!! Is there any way to make it go faster? Also just to verify this! the cpu percentage should be low doing this as the HDD is doing all the work right?

If any more info is needed plz let me know TY for your time.

If he is compressing the data or verifying before writing it, it will place demand on the CPU.

If his backup times seem slow, he should check to insure hes not verifying before writing. Can you tell us what program he is using?

Oh, BTW, this is the wrong section

He doesnt have it compressed. I will try to find out the program used for the backup. may take a couple of hours (prob 3) i am in school right now.

Oh an dsorry for it being in the wrong place i kinda thought it was either for cpu or hdd thread so i picked cpu.

So is there any way to speed it up or does it depend on the program?

What is he backing up to? A tape drive? A network drive of some sort? What?

Hard drive to hard drive

If he's using IDE drives, check to make sure DMA is enabled (In the Device Manager, under the IDE Controllers - check the Properties for the channel the drives are on - the DMA Mode is given in the "Advanced Settings" tab.) If DMA isn't enabled, you may have to enable it in the BIOS.

You could also try putting the drives on seperate channels.

I'm assuming he's using XP. If he's using Win98, then check for the "noide" problem:
Search the regisrty for "noide" (No quotes). If found, delete it.

It wouldn't hurt to do a full surface scan for bad sectors on both drives. Sectors can be "going bad" and that will delay reads and writes to them dramatically without causing the read or write to fail.

If both drives are IDE and on the same channel, then they share the same data pipe, so it will effectively be reading from one then writing to the other and repeat. This is one huge advantage SATA has because all drives are on their own channel (one can be reading while the other is being written to).