Ghost Solution Suite

On certain systems I'm getting much lower than expected transfer speeds but I'm having a hard time narrowing it down to a specific hardware component. The maximum transfer speed I am able to get is just shy of 100 MB/min.

These machines have both SATA and Broadcom network cards. I've read various reports on the web that Ghost and SATA, when working, frequently performs poorly. The same seems to happen with Broadcom NICs. Seeing these systems have both, I'm wondering what to do next.

I tried specify different network driver templates. Ghost's default for these machines is set to "Broadcom 440x"

The other suggested option "Broadcom BCM4401" does not work. I also tried manually selecting the Universal Packet Driver v2.0 and the irqcfg version of it. Neither of these three templates work at all, meaning it doesn't even boot up to the virtual partition. It loads the driver and then immediately reboots the computer back into Windows. The "Pause" button doesn't seem to work so I can't pause the program to read the output on screen for errors. No error log is created to refer back to, either.

I've tried the three network data transfer modes. They all perform the same.

Searching for info some people suggested trying the -fni command line option. This has a negative impact on performance. It slows to a crawl. I might get 1 MB/min but it seems to be even slower than that.

Any other suggestions are appreciated.

After writing this message I called Symantec Tech Support and the problem has been resolved.

Configuring the image create task to pass the "-noide" command line option fixed the problem. Transfer speeds are currently fluxuating between 260 and 310 MB/min. A lot better than the previous <100 MB/min.

I still think it could/should be faster than this. My next test will be trying to disable the onboard Broadcom network card and trying a different card to see if it makes any difference.