> I noticed that you didn't mention the file system type. The effects of > file system type and layout of the subject instance is an often > overlooked contributor to performance in operations which are > mass-populating the file system, as a restoral will. A journaled file > system can exhibit a lot of overhead as its journal is written with at > least metadata, depending upon type; and an ill-located journal can > make for a lot of disk arm diversions during the restoral, aggravating > elapsed time.
The output file system was Ext2, which is not journalled.
