Multiple Hard Drive copying through RAID

Is there a way to copy one hard drive to multiple hard drives (like a cd duplicator, but for hard drives) I have a sata raid card installed with 8 hot swap bays attached to it, but have yet to find any software that will allow me to duplicate hard drives.

Thanks for the help in advance.

Daegon said:

Is there a way to copy one hard drive to multiple hard drives (like a cd duplicator, but for hard drives) I have a sata raid card installed with 8 hot swap bays attached to it, but have yet to find any software that will allow me to duplicate hard drives.

Thanks for the help in advance.

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IIRC Partition Magic 8 allows you to make copies of drives. It's not free, though. I know there are other programs out there that are free and similar to it, you'd have to ask around though.

Partition Magic and similar apps like Paragon Drive Backup 7 do allow disk copying, but it's only from one source to one target. I'm looking for a software solution that is similar to the multi-thousand dollar disk duplicators.

It's not very clear what your goals are. Will this machine be running an OS, if so, which, are these low-level copies you're after or file-level, is this its only role, will there be multiple dupes in action at once, etc.?

i work for a lan center/cybercafe, where we have about 30 identical computers. The machine is designed to just be a hard drive copier, it has a raid card with 8 sata raid connectors (from highpoint technologies) It's currently running windows xp, but if you have a solution that is under linux or dos that's fine.

Basically, we have one dedicated 'master' pc, which we propegate to all the other computers on a weekly basis. We just want to find a faster way to do it. We've tried: network ghosting through linux, pulling hard drives and using the included sata raid bios on the motherboard.

I've heard that linux's dd may fit the bill, but i am not familiar with it.

If you're pushing out disk images for OS and application deployment, check into into the real Norton Ghost for the Ghostcast functionality, or a GPLed app called G4U, which is also on the UltimatebootCD. We use Ghostcasts extensively at work to keep the workstations on a standard set of images and will keep doing this until we convert the non-power users over to dumb terms. G4U isn't quite as fast as Ghost since it's done on a 1:1 basis (Ghost does 1:many via UDP broadcasts), but it certainly costs less. If you put your FTP server on a very fast network connection you can get G4U's performance up there, though. Just FYI the G4U app is essentially a network-aware dd utility, making a byte-copy of a drive, storing it to an FTP server, then restoring off it later on.

we have a system for doing it over the network, however it has recently become frightfully slow and tedious, as it's copying about 200gb over the network to ~30 pc's. We've had some problems with system and network stability when the server was pushing out that many copies.

One idea we've hatched is to make an image of the hard drive we want to copy, then find some software that will write that image to multiple hard drives simultaneously.

we just have to find that app.

Then consider Ghost and setting up a Ghostcast server. We've done 15GB deployments to 50 PCs on switched gigE, granted the server is dual gigE, the clients were mainly 100Mbit, in under 20 minutes. It actually took longer to boot all the machines with the boot disks and set them up on the Ghostcast session.