I just ran tests on the latest Macrium Reflect 5 free and Easus ToDo Backup free on my 2 HP machines. Just thought I'd post the results in case someone is using similar hardware. This mainly concerns SIIG USB 3.0 PCI Express card. The card uses the standard NEC driver. For that reason it may give a clue if USB 3.0 support will work for you.
The test was only using the Linux restore CD made from the image included in both products. I did not try WinPE restore discs. Prior to performing a boot with each disc I brought the systems down and killed the power. You can get a false sense of security if you just shut down as the device can be initialized by the driver since the last boot.
The 2 HP machines I have are HP M9515y Tower and HP AMD 5200+ Tower. Both have identical SIIG USB 3.0 add on cards.
The M9515y machine has the handicap that it uses a software raid driver that can hide the system HD and optical drive from some boot CDs. This is a royal pita because when you boot the CD all you can see is the 1.44 MB boot image that the BIOS knows about. Floppy boot compatible crapola iow. In this case, both the Macrium and Easus ToDo detected the drive through the fake raid.
The difference is the SIIG.
The Macrium Linux restore CD did not recognize the USB 3.0 card in either machine.
The Easus ToDo Backup 5.3 recognized the USB 3.0 card on both PCs.
My conclusion.. if you are running an SIIG USB 3.0 PCI Express card and wish to be able to restore at the higher USB 3.0 speeds, the Easus ToDo Backup Free is the choice between these two softwares. The Macrium Paid version likely has USB 3.0 support but I would do a similar test with the Trial version before buying. I believe the Trial will let you burn a Linux Restore CD. Of course if you do the WinPE you have the option of including Windows drivers. I tried this route once but it turned out the WinPE did not have native support for my fake raid. So it was a hassle to store a copy of the driver on a USB stick yadda yadda. I'd rather just use a Linux boot that does the job out of the box.
Some may say so what? Just restore at USB 2.0 speed. Unfortunately it's an all or nothing deal. Either the driver works with the USB 3.0 card or it doesn't. You don't get USB 2.0 out of the USB 3.0 card. You get restore program does not recognize it at all. So then you're stuck doing slow copies to USB 2.0 drives to make sure you can restore in an emergency.
Note this is device specific stuff. I'm not saying one software = good other = bad. Just thought I'd save some time for the SIIG users in the crowd. If I'm the only one then at least it's some exercise fighting with the spell checker.
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