Performance considerations

Note that the discussion below is based on hardware technology as of December 2007.

For the best performance when recovering a large amount of data, the destination folder should be created on a newly formatted volume to minimize disk fragmentation. Additionally, to recover files larger than 4 GB, the volume must not be in FAT or FAT32 format because of the file size limit imposed by these file systems.

The speed of recovery usually depends on how fast data can be copied to the destination folder. If the folder resides on an internal hard drive, the recovery rate is typically a few gigabytes a minute. Larger files can be copied at a faster rate than smaller ones.

External drives attached via USB can be much slower. In many cases, the recovery rate can be in the range of one to a few hundred megabytes per minute, which is an order of magnitude slower compared to internal drives.

If the destination folder resides on a network shared folder or a network attached device, the rate of recovery usually falls in between the internal and external drives.