I guess the test will be to go to DOS mode and as an experiment use XCOPY /S/E/ to copy the drive and see how long that takes, just as a
comparison.

Well, XCOPY didn't work -- it cratered every time it came to a read-only, system, or hidden file.

However, my favorite disk-management program, Z-Tree for Windows, has a "Mirror" function that copies all files including subdirectories from one directory to another, or one partition to another, or one disk to another -- whatever. It only choked on a few files - like the AppLog file for its own executable, and a couple of system files, but did so gracefully -- allowing me to skip the offending files.

Total copy time, start to finish for 15.1 GB was just over 12 minutes. However, whether my D: drive is still bootable now that I overwrote all the files on it with ZTree is unknown. It's past one in the morning now, and I'm running out of patience for experimentation.

The main thing is... I know now that my system is capable of sustained data transfer from one drive to another in excess of 1.25 GB per minute, so Drive Image's copy speed of less than 1/4 that speed while it is actually copying, and 1/10 that speed for the overall process would appear to be a problem in software, not hardware.

My $13 copy of "Ghost" turned out to be a Norton AntiVirus CD, so I still don't have that software for comparison. The lady who sold it to me was very nice, realized she had made an error, and has already put the correct CD in the mail to me, so I'll know later this week if Ghost will do any better for me.

tanstaafl

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"