[dnanian]

This is going to be a disappointing reply, Dennis, but - the fact is, Smart Updates involve reading a zillion teeny bits of information (metadata), comparing them, walking the directory trees, etc.

So there's a lot of "back and forth" between a lot of layers of the OS...and speeding up the drive only matters to a certain extent (when things are generally not being copied).

Since a lot of that information is directory information, and the directory is aggressively cached, speeding up the drive won't make a huge difference.

Similarly, copying, say, a giant file is faster than copying a million tiny files that add up to the same size...because the "bookkeeping" time ends up being a larger percentage of time (you know, a million calls to the OS vs. a smaller amount).

With regard to creating the snapshot, well, we ask the system to do it and it takes what it takes. You'll note that we're not CPU bound - we're mostly waiting for the OS to do things...