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Clone Backups on Steroids
As preparation for a changeover to 8TB hard drives once MPG testing of Hitachi HGST 8TB He8 hard drives is done, I wanted to bring a bunch of my external backups up to date.
For backups, I use a clone backup strategy. With this many backups going at once it is amusing to see much of the CPU power of an 8-core Mac Pro is utilized by the 'rsync' process! A 4-core or 6-core Mac Pro would have been borderline unusable during the backups.
Such activities are definitely non-mainstream, but they are one reason I favor an 8-core 3.3 GHz Mac Pro. It is also a reason that I like to make my primary storage at least a 2-drive striped RAID, if not a RAID-5: so that multiple simultaneous backups from can run simultaneously at reasonable speed.
In this case speed is hampered by some contention on the backup drives (partitions), but I wanted to go ride my bike while the backups completed. Still, write throughput in total was around 700 MB/sec.
