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Vista Transfer rates

phillyman36

Golden Member
Hey i just got a Wd External hd. When i start to transfer 160 gigs of data to my wd ext hd vista estimates about 4+ hours. It says the transfer rate is 5. mb ish. When i dual boot and use xp the same size files xp estimates it to be 67 minutes. Does anyone else have this problem with vista and if so did you find a fix? I dont have an e-sata cord (just ordered it today) so im using the usb cord until the cable comes but will my transfer rates with esata be as slow as well because of Vista?
 
I'm assuming Vista recognizes the USB controller as 2.0?

Also did you let it run for a little while to see how fast it's *actually* transferring? It's improved quite a bit in the aforementioned update, even so Explorer isn't exactly the best at guesstimating transfer time requirements (in Vista or XP) so may want to make sure you're not chasing a non-issue.
 
Mr Chad thanks ill try that and see what happens

spyordie007 the transfers went form 8 hour to 4 hours and after about 4 minutes of it saying 4 hours is when i stopped it.

Ill try the update and then when the cable gets here ill try to see what speeds i get from esata
 
Question i just checked under the properties and it says the file system is fat32. Should it be ntfs? I think i may need to reformat the drive
 
I wouldn't figure on Vista being much different with FAT32 than XP, but you can convert it if you want (no need to reformat in most cases). The update is still a good first step.
 
It appears i have the update already. When i tried to install it it says my system doesnt need the update so ill reformat then try
 
Try this:
Open the Control Panel
Make sure you are in Classic View
Open the Device Manager
Expand Disk drives
Double click on your external hard drive
Click on the Polices tab
Make sure Optimize for performance is selected, also check Enable write caching and Enable advanced performance
Hit OK and close the device manager. Windows may ask you to reboot at this point.
 
Ok after i reformatted to ntfs i got a steady 7 to 8 mb/sec . MB i did what you said (thanks) i checked the optimize tab but under vista i didnt see the enable write cache. That got me to a steady 10 mb/sec. When i get my esata cord ill let you all know what the speed is thanks
 
Glad that you got it sorted 🙂

Anyway, I've noticed the same thing that spyordie007 mentioned-Vista will show a supposed lengthy transfer time but suddenly it's done and a lot quicker😕
I have all the patches and checkboxes for my external drives, it just seems to be a "quirk" in the estimate.
 
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