Paul wrote:

The word on the street is that "Version 7 is faster".
("Faster than what".)

Might be true but the free version is always throttled. So the payware
versions might be noticeably faster but the the free version will get
little enhanced, if at all. The speedup may not even be present in the
Home and Workstation versions and only in the Server [Plus] versions.
There are features in the payware versions to help speedup the softwa
incremental images, rapid delta cloning, synthetic backups, and whatever
is meant by "server class OS backup and restore".

From the online manual for v7:
https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/di...ormance+dialog

So using direct disk writes might be the perceived performance boost.
However, since I schedule daily backups (relying on a user to backup
when appropriate means it doesn't get done or so irregularly that the
images are actually for disaster recovery instead of data recovery), any
performance boost wouldn't be noticed. I'm not there waiting for the
job to complete.

Macrium has already slid in the v7 knowledgebase at their base URL.
Took some searching to find the old v7 knowledgebase at:

https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/di...+v6+User+Guide

When I search there on "disk write", nothing found. What I did find
was:

https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/di...ormance+issues

It mentions a tuning option in v6 called "Enable file write caching."
That would be the slower write method using file I/O API calls to the OS
to write the image files. The dialog show is found under the Other
Tasks - Edit Defaults menu. Under the Advanced category is the "file
cache" option. It is disabled in my setup. I doubt that I changed it
so direct writes is the default method.

Although the v6 knowledgebase doesn't have a FAQ article about direct
disk writes and the v7 knowledgebase does, direct writes were the
default method in v6, too. Backup programs are I/O bound so perhaps the
performance boost was noticed by users that had already changed out to a
faster HDD or went to an SSD or improved their network speed for the
destination of the image file. For Macrium Reflect to become CPU bound
would require extremely fast target media along with slow CPUs. Even
the compression and encryption queues (threads) are almost always
waiting for delivery of data.

Another factor that will speedup backup jobs is disabling the anti-virus
program from scanning the target path where the image files are being
written. Some AVs keep scanning as more data is written to the image
file while some cease scanning after awhile, like after 100 MB has been
written into the file. Some users have noticed excluding the target
path for image files will reduce the time to write them. So changes in
AV software or switching to different AV programs can effect a
performance gain or loss.

From the typical reports you get from users claiming performance
changes, it's nearly impossible to determine the cause. Don't even know
on which OS the user reporting "v7 is faster". For example, if Windows
XP, Reflect might fail to read the VSS snapshot which was fixed in v7.
One bug fix in v7 is extremely vague: "Very slow backups - Some
customers have experienced reported transfer rates of low mb/s or kb/s
during disk Image backups. This has been resolved." Image verify was
also sped up but the user would have to enable that option in their
backup jobs. Also see:

https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/di...+16th+Mar+2017

Could be the users noticing a performance boost were storing their
images to a target drive that is much slower than the source drive. I
backup from an SSD to an HDD (and later clone to a USB HDD). So the
target drive is definitely much slower and a bottleneck compared to the
source drive. This article refers to the direct disk write option noted
in the first article. Yet the "file cache" option in V6 seems to be for
the same purpose. All v7 did was change how the direct disk write
option is presented to the user. v7 has an auto-check function where in
v6 the user had to ensure the "file caching" option was disabled (which,
I thought, was the default).