Duplicate partition to multiple targets simultaneously?

[jamesb]

I do the hardware support for a mobile DJ/KJ company. We get weekly and monthly updates for our music, all of which is used from IDE hard drives. I currently support approximately 30 of these drives, and we like to update them all monthly. I have a box setup with 4 removable hard drive bays, and I know I can use DD to replicate from a source to a single target or create a RAID1 device with the source drive as the first one in the list and the targets as the other three but both of these methods are rather slow. DD does only a single drive at a time and the background synchronization of the RAID takes a couple of hours even for a 32GB partition, which is the smallest that I work with.

What I'm hoping is that someone knows of a utility that will attempt to write to multiple source drives simultaneously, or close enough to it so that it's actually faster to duplicate than it is to connect the drives to a USB hub and simply copy the ~30GB of music in question to each drive (Approximately 20-30 minutes). If not a separate utility then perhaps some wierd combination of existing commands and devices that I haven't thought of that would accomplish the task....

Just FYI, the 30GB partitions aren't really that much of an issue, but I'm using them as a scaled test. Our full DJ sets are 220GB or so and our karaoke setups run 90GB... since I'm assuming the time involved to use DD to individual targets or synchronize a mirror will increase approximately linearly with the size of the partition I'm really concerned about how long these larger operations will take.

[bigtomrodney]

Have you ever used Symantec Ghost? You can use the multicast option to send the image to several boxes at a time over network cable. On a 100Mbps Cat5e I used to send a 20GB disk image across to another machine in about 4-5 minutes writing at about 6Mb/s.

Partimage is the open source Linux equivalent but I'm not sure if it supports multicast. Ghost does work with ext3 partitions to my knowledge.

[jamesb]

Yes, I have a Ghost bootable CD that I keep handy for doing images of disks when I want different sized partitions as an end result. The problem with the multicast option is that you've got to have multiple machines to work with, in reality I have 6 or 7 here but only one that can be dedicated to this task.