• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

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

M

merk

Senior member
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?
 
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).
 
thanks, i'll give robocopy or acronis a try.

anyone know why its so much slower copying with windows explorer?
 
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.
 
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.
 
Are the drives IDE & in the same channel?

That generally tends to be very slow.
 
Originally posted by: Seekermeister
anyone know why its so much slower copying with windows explorer?
Click to expand...
Could be because it is a product of MS.
Click to expand...

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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top