Carbon Copy Cloner: Hung During Copy

I have used CCC a few times now with no issues at all (assuming I use Disk Utility to first erase the destination drive), but tonight (twice), it hung during the "applications" part of the copy. I erased the drive again, and just did the copy with Disk Utility, and all went well. I'm inclined to just do my imaging that way, but I'm wondering if any of the apps for that purpose (SuperDuper for example) can do the copy any faster. Is there any real advantage to any of the drive copy apps over just using Disk Utility? Thanks!

Mark