blasting away on doing backups of the streaming pc. the software is so heavy and nuanced that i'm doing full disk image backups over high speed devices.

I can just boot from an external device, and hit dd with:
dd /dev/sda /dev/sdb bs=16M and it screams. If I need to invoke the backup, i do the same procedure just with the inputs and outputs swapped.

It finished copying before I could finish this thread, 128GB in about 6 minutes! I wonder why it starts much much faster and then slows as time goes on..it started at 640MB/s, then got down in the 500s, and the final average was 376..still not a bad speed but why does it degrade?