copying a hd...why is it so slow?

merk

Senior member
May 29, 2003
471
9
91
Hey all,

I'm trying to copy a partition from one drive to another. I used gparted the first time to do this and it took maybe an hour for the whole drive. Unfortunately due to the way vista handles drives, this didnt work. So since i wasnt copying a boot drive i decided to just format the drive in vista and then copy the files across using windows explorer. But its been close to an hour and its only about half way done with a single partition and it saying 90 minutes more to copy the rest.

why is it so much slower copying files in windows as opposed to using something like gparted or partition magic? i've noticed this in win98, win2000 and xp. So its not just something in vista.

Is there a faster way to simply copy files from one partition to another?
 

Hardlin

Senior member
Aug 27, 2004
226
0
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You can robocopy it over too. Never use the gui (Windows Explorer) to copy large amounts of data. It's just too inefficient. I use robocopy all the time to move large amounts of data from one drive to another or even across a network (700GB - 40TB copies).
 

merk

Senior member
May 29, 2003
471
9
91
thanks, i'll give robocopy or acronis a try.

anyone know why its so much slower copying with windows explorer?
 

HaroldW

Member
Mar 24, 2001
140
0
0
Merk:

If you are trying to copy a partition that includes the operating system, just copying files will not work. I would suggest Ghost, Acronis True Image, or possibly Clone-Maxx. If you are trying to copy the whole hard drive Clone-Maxx will do it. Clone -Maxx is free and can be downloaded here: http://www.pcinspector.de/clone-maxx/uk/welcome.htm Also, be advised copying a partition, or a hard drive frequently takes a long time. I suggest you get it started shortly before you go to bed and let it run overnight.
 

merk

Senior member
May 29, 2003
471
9
91
nope not trying to copy a boot partition. just copying a data drive to a new larger drive.

I have acronis running right now. its faster then copying files in windows explorer, but still slow compared to something like gparted. That seemed to take about a hour...acronis is saying 2 hours. but i guess on the plus side, with acronis i can still use the pc while its doing its thing. it seems that the copying process is always much faster when its not done in windows but in another environment. Any of the disk cloning software i've used before that didnt run in windows seemed to copy things much faster.
 

n7

Elite Member
Jan 4, 2004
21,281
4
81
Are the drives IDE & in the same channel?

That generally tends to be very slow.
 

merk

Senior member
May 29, 2003
471
9
91
nope, i should have mentioned that. Its IDE to SATA...4 minutes left on the copy so far.
 

Jeff7

Lifer
Jan 4, 2001
41,596
20
81
Originally posted by: Seekermeister
anyone know why its so much slower copying with windows explorer?
Could be because it is a product of MS.

Or simply because the hard drive is also busy running Windows and various background apps. Every time one of those apps, or the operating system, needs the hard drive, it needs to stop copying the file, seek the requested data, read or write it, and then seek back to the file copying operation. Seeing how rapid seeking is one thing that hard drives suck at, eliminating this factor by using a utility like Acronis True Image, which either runs off of a boot disk, or which will lock the drives as they are being worked on, will considerably improve the copying speed.
 

AllWhacked

Senior member
Nov 1, 2006
236
0
0
Are the hard drives on a controller card built onto the motherboard? I find that transfering data through PCI controller cards is a slow process due to the limit on the PCI bus.

While I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, Norton will normally have a data transfer rate of 800-1000Mb/s (or was it minute?) while onboard, versus 100 Mb/s through a PCI controller card.

So a drive transfering 80GB would finish in about an hour whereas through the controller card, it takes practically 1/2 the night.

Also, if you are just copying one partition to another (overrighting anything on the target partition), it's often faster to use Norton Ghost than xcopy or robocopy.
 

merk

Senior member
May 29, 2003
471
9
91
on board controller on the mobo. it wasnt too horribly slow using acronis, although it was faster when i did with gparted. Except some of the changes in vista make using gparted problematic which is why i couldnt use that copy. acronis is vista ok so that worked.