HD to HD transfer very slow.. brand new HDs

[Vesper8]

hey everyone.. I just got a new Seagate Barracuda 300GB 7200.9 16MB 11MS SATA2 NCQ RoHS Hard Drive

i am transferring some files to it from a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB SATA2 7200RPM 16MB 9MS NCQ Quiet RoHS Hard Drive

and it is taking forever! i'm talking 10 minutes per 5gb !! that seems extremely slow to me.. i plan to fill the HD and at this rate it will take over 6 hours just to transfer files to it.

what could be causing these extremely slow speeds ?

you can see my specs/MB in my sig

 

[arcenite]

That is approximately 8.5 megs per second. That does suck.

 

[Vesper8]

yes indeed! it should be neared to like what ? 66mbs / sec at least i think ?

is it caz i have to disable some gizmos like NCQ? im not even sure what that does.. but i really hope i find out why it's so slow! i need your help experts !

 

[Vesper8]

double post

 

[potato28]

Is one of the HDD's in a enclosure?

 

[Vesper8]

no they're both in my case.. connected directly on the 4 sata ports of my a8n-e

 

[Shaftatplanetquake]

If you have 4 Sata ports, maybe you have 2 controllers?

You might want to try them plugged into different controllers if they aren't already. If they are, then try them on the same controller.

Also, be sure you have installed the proper drivers for everything.

Be sure to check the BIOS for the motherboard and also for the sata controller(s). Be sure you understand every setting related to disks or disk controllers, and if you don't RTFM.

 

[Vesper8]

i do have two controllers and out of blind luck both HDs already were on different controllers

however your message made me look in places i hadn't thought of looking before.. in windows' device manager under serial ata properties i noticed that one of my sata2 HDs had had it's transfer speed downgraded by windows due to excessive transfer errors.. it was down to PIO mode whatever that means.. I switched it back to sata2 and rebooted and now it's transferring much faster

i haven't disabled NCQ yet but i hear that might help as well.. to disable NCQ I just disable "command queuing" right ? and what about read caching and write caching.. can these cause slowdowns ?

thanks for the help.. im learning more every time i post

 

[Jiggz]

Caching actually improves data transfer except it has a setback of losing data if you accidentally power down the system before it gets written into the disk. Make sure at least the write cache is enabled.

 

[Zepper]

If your AV program is set to watch local files, it could be slowing things down. Windows auto indexing can slow things down. Anything that may be trying to access either of the two drives in the background during the txfer may slow it down, etc. etc... Under the drive performance settings in Dev Mgr, if you set your machine type to server, it will give you a larger read-ahead drive cache and bump other drive perfomance parameters. Leaving it set to desktop tries to balance performace and gives the drive the shorter end of the stick.

.bh.