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Hard drive transfer speed

V

VERTIGGO

Senior member
I'm copying 22GB from my Raptor 74GB to my WD 400GB and it's taking 100min. I know because it's over halfway, and it's taken more than 45min so far. That's like 3.5MBps which is really slow. Why would it copy slowly? Is there a way to tell?
 
If you are trying to copy a lot of small files, then yes, it will take longer than copying larger files. The only other thing I can think of would be your IDE drivers need updating, or something else is using your drive read/write resources in the background?
 
Run HDtach on both drives to check transfer rates, and make sure neither of the drives is stuck in PIO mode or something.
 
A properly configured 7200rpm HDD should be able to deliver at least 13MB/sec in read/write speed. Both drives should be operating in DMA mode. Newer 7200rpm drives will run between 18 and 22MB/sec, depending on size and type of data.
 
PIO is where all the data gets routed from one HD to another through the CPU. It's old, outdated and very slow. To check it go into device mangaer, find your IDE channels and go to advanced. Somewhere in there you should see transfer method : UDMA (or maybe It will say PIO) if it says PIO change it to UDMA.

A bit of googling will find some much better written guides to this though.
 
Definatly back to normal. It was stuck in PIO mode for sure, and you did exactly what you needed to clear that. If windows detects an error too many times, it will force a drive to run in PIO mode even if you have it set to DMA mode. There is a registry trick that will prevent it from happening again, but can't remember where I found it at the moment.
 
hi guys i have the same problem but im using a sata drive and its stuck at 3.6 mb/sec which is crap..... hitachi doesnt offer drivers so what should i do?

Thanks
 
Originally posted by: stevty2889
Definatly back to normal. It was stuck in PIO mode for sure, and you did exactly what you needed to clear that. If windows detects an error too many times, it will force a drive to run in PIO mode even if you have it set to DMA mode. There is a registry trick that will prevent it from happening again, but can't remember where I found it at the moment.
Click to expand...

You can find it by searching Microsoft, there's a problem report. IIRC, the registry change will require that the problems occur 5 times sequentially before the fallback to lower speed, so any success between the 5 errors will prevent the fallback. This wouldn't correct the error, only uninstallation would AFAIK, but it would reduce its recurrance.
 
Originally posted by: furballi
Newer 7200rpm drives will run between 18 and 22MB/sec, depending on size and type of data.
Click to expand...

I've found modern drives transferring large non-fragmented files to give rates around 30-35 MB/s in practice (using xcopy; not sure if it matters), so you could aim even higher.
 
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