Originally Posted by hwm54112

While it may seem that you are performing the same operation, comparing apples to apples, you aren’t. Just the fact that the backup partition is located on disk space that is further away from the idle position of the read/write heads than the system partition is makes the backup operation slower. More than likely, the average file sizes are going to be different. Yes you are extracting the same file or image, but that is not the sole file size factor, It’s the sizes of the other files on the partitions that make the difference and part of that difference is a function of the defrag method. When a file is accessed, the read arm doesn’t go rite to the file. It goes to a table to find out where the pieces of the file are stored. Just because the drive has been defragged, it doesn’t mean the file or image has been defragged. Some defraggers move data at random just so long as all data is in contiguous space, while other defraggers rearrange the data while it is being moved so that the file fragments are contiguous with each other and that makes a difference in file access time. Even though the test images look the same on a monitor, the fact is one of those images could be fragmented all over the drive while the other is entirely in contiguous space.