Couple of questions:

I received my new IDE cable from Eutronix - thanks. I now have a 120 GB Mark 2. I would like to clone my 60 GB unit to this new blank 120 GB unit, but USB seems so slow to do this - the 60 is about 70% full. Is there an ethernet alternative floating around?

Roger has a couple of pages describing how to use tar + netcat or rsync to clone / synchronise the content of 2 players.

/Michael

Also, the drive upgrade guide has information on how to directly copy files by plugging in disk drives.

I'm not sure which is faster, the rsync method or the direct-disk-copy method.

I'm not sure which is faster, the rsync method or the direct-disk-copy method.

I've never measured disk-to-disk bandwidth on an Empeg, but memory-to-disk bandwidth is about 6Mbytes/sec (which probably saturated the head rate of the winchester), so with a bit of luck disk-to-disk should be at least 3Mbytes/sec, or far faster than USB or rsync. (Unless, of course, you're using rsync to make minor updates to an existing duplicate copy.)

The only faster way would be to plug both disks into a Linux PC, which will certainly be able to saturate head rate on both disks for a throughput of 6Mbytes/sec -- perhaps more with modern disks.

Peter

Many of these 30GB drives can sustain around 18MB/sec bandwidth on a fast enough interface.. The Empeg's IDE controller is the bottleneck for us, as has been previously noted.

Cheers