Poor hard drive performance

[OVerLoRDI]

I am a bit of a digital pack rat and as a result I am constantly moving lots of files between many hard drives. The problem I'm trying to track down is related to hard drive performance. My current machine has 7 hard drives connected via SATA. 6 of them are on the main AMD 750 south bridge controller and the last one is connected to an Gigabyte SATA2 on board SATA controller that adds 2 more SATA plugs. My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P.

Example of problem: When I'm moving files between hard drives 1 and 2 performance is what you would expect for local hard drive transfers. But the second I start another file transfer between a different pair of hard drives, transfer speeds plummet.

My thought is I'm hitting some sort of bandwidth maximum on the controllers, but that seems unlikely. Does anyone have an idea about what could be causing this? I'm running Windows 7 Professional 64bit and have the latest drivers for both controllers.

 

[Elixer]

What kind of speed drop we talking about?
Have you tried a benchmark on each HD to get a rough idea if they are all the same speed?

 

[OVerLoRDI]

the copying speed is obviously limited by the slowest hard drive, but none of my hard drives are dinosaurs. I'm talking speed drops from 50mb/s on a large file down to sub 10mb/s.

 

[garritynet]

Go into your device manager and roll back all the AMD drivers that you installed to the ones W7 used. Chipset, SATA, everything. See how well your board performs with just the W7 drivers installed. The performance on my WD6400AAKS drives literally doubled when I did this.

 

[Tech_savy]

The speed is limited when transferring a file between hard disks.