Windows 7 copy extremely slow

[mxnerd]

I was copying about 40GB (4000 items according to Win 7) between partitions on the same drive (5400RPM) on my laptop (2.3G AMD Turion X2, 4GB memory) and the operation is extremely slow, at about 11.3MB/sec, take more than 30 minutes.

Is it always this slow on Windows 7 / Vista? Is there any way to speed it up? What will be the normal speed of copying on a laptop 5400MB drive?

 

[Silan]

If you have an antivirus with real time protection it will slow down copying. If you do, disable real time protection for a copy and see if any difference.

 

[mxnerd]

Thanks. I do have Avast installed. I'll uninstall it and see.

 

[mxnerd]

Uninstalled Avast and do a second test, and it's even slower, down to 10MB/sec! Although it's different data set, since I merged directory after copying/moving files from one directory to another.

Only when I copy/moving large file like ISO images, it's up to 20MB/sec, but it still looks slow to me.

 

[mxnerd]

I was wrong. It just starts at 20MB/sec then still down to 11.0 MB/sec at the end, just copying one CentOS 5.4 ISO file with size of 3.9GB

 

[Erik550c]

i'm running win7 and have found everything non-gaming to be as fast or faster than win xp. you shouldn't see any speed difference in transferring files. more than likely it has to do with something else either than a general "windows 7" issue. you are copying large amounts from on partition on the same drive to another with a laptop 5400 rpm. that wouldn't exactly have the best throughput. do you know if on another os with two partitions if you had faster speeds?

 

[mxnerd]

I don't know exactly the speed of other O.S. on this machine, since most of the time I use my desktop, just recently I switch to this laptop and Win 7 since my desktop Intel motherboard starts to have problem booting up and stuck at login screen many times.

I'll install XP on this machine later today and see.

 

[MStele]

Try checking your chipset drivers. The ones that come with Windows 7 usually suck and i've heard many stories like this where the problems went away after updating to the latest drivers.

 

[Erik550c]

try a new chipset driver first

 

[vshah]

copying to and from the same disk, especially when it is a 5400rpm laptop drive, is i pretty bad case for performance. i would say that is normal.

 

[JACKDRUID]

I was copying about 40GB (4000 items according to Win 7) between partitions on the same drive (5400RPM) on my laptop (2.3G AMD Turion X2, 4GB memory) and the operation is extremely slow, at about 11.3MB/sec, take more than 30 minutes.

Is it always this slow on Windows 7 / Vista? Is there any way to speed it up? What will be the normal speed of copying on a laptop 5400MB drive?

between partitions...

if you don't need the data to exist on both partitions, simply 'move' them might speed up the operation.

copying is always slow. its like writing 40gb onto the hard drive, its gonna take some time.

 

[mxnerd]

OK, went to AMD site and could not find new drivers for my MSI GX710 chipset, MSI website does not have any new driver for Win7 either.

Some drivers can be found on AMD website. AMD already called it legacy.

v9.11
http://support.amd.com/us/psearch/P...hipset+Motherboard&ostype=&keywords=&items=20

new driver

v9.9 BETA
http://support.amd.com/us/psearch/P...Windows+7+-+64-Bit+Edition&keywords=&items=20

Does the 9.9 beta driver even comes with south bridge/IGP driver at all? Or I just have to wait?

 

[StormSide]

Of course it is going to be slow. Even though they are different partitions it is still
the same drive. I did a test on my desktop copying a folder and it settled down at
about 18MB and these were large files. You are copying 4000 smaller files across the
same drive. It will be slowwwwwww. No driver is going to make it magically faster.

 

[Erik550c]

agreed. it's a 5400 rpm hard drive copying from the the same drive to the same drive. cut it instead of copying or just wait for it to copy over. it's not because of windows 7

 

[Doggiedog]

I'm having some massive problems with Windows 7 myself. I'm going to do a clean install over an upgrade now and copying my C drive files over to another drive. I started at about 9MB per sec but now I'm down to 4.13MBPS. Either my C drive is dying or there is something wrong as well.

Right now it says it will take more than 1 day to copy my 1TB drive over to my 3TB RAID drive.

 

[Modelworks]

That is an issue both vista and win7 have. It occurs because of how they both handle file management. The way they do it works great until you get a large number of files then it chokes. It also has the problem of one file failing and it aborting the transfer.

To get around it I use teracopy . Free and easy to use. Designed specifically for copying large amounts of files.
http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php

It also has different copy algorithms where it detects if the partitions are on the same drive, different, or over a network.

 

[mxnerd]

The way I understand it, moving a file and copying a file is basically the same thing.

Except moving a file does the copy operation first, when O.S. think the operation is completed, it delete the old file from the disk, which is only an action of marking the file being deleted, and that's it.

That's why when you are moving a file to another place and if computer shuts down unexpected, the file remain where it is and is not corrupted.

 

[Erik550c]

moving and copying is not the same thing. cutting and pasting just changes the file header that points to where the files really are on the hd and is why it only takes a second to complete the transfer. if you defragment and chkdsk meticulously this will keep your system performance up after doing operations like this. i have had no problems with moving large amounts of data in win 7 but it could be a problem that exists with it. either way, his system is a slow laptop and i would put the blame on the hard drive over win7. 11.3MB/sec for a 30 minute 40 gig transfer in this environment is not unreasonable

 

[mxnerd]

moving and copying is not the same thing. cutting and pasting just changes the file header that points to where the files really are on the hd and is why it only takes a second to complete the transfer. if you defragment and chkdsk meticulously this will keep your system performance up after doing operations like this. i have had no problems with moving large amounts of data in win 7 but it could be a problem that exists with it. either way, his system is a slow laptop and i would put the blame on the hard drive over win7. 11.3MB/sec for a 30 minute 40 gig transfer in this environment is not unreasonable

You are right about copying and moving on the same partition.

However, moving & copying between partitions is different from moving & copying on the same partition, since different partition has it's own file allocation table, you do have to copy first to another partition and mark original being deleted.

But I do agree maybe it's the drive being too slow, probably not a fault of Win7

 

[Erik550c]

You are right about copying and moving on the same partition.

However, moving & copying between partitions is different from moving & copying on the same partition, since different partition has it's own file allocation table, you do have to copy first to another partition and mark original being deleted.

But I do agree maybe it's the drive being too slow, probably not a fault of Win7

you're right... i forgot about it being an another partition

 

[AFurryReptile]

To get around it I use teracopy . Free and easy to use. Designed specifically for copying large amounts of files.
http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php

I'll second Teracopy. Whereas Windows throttles my transfer to roughly 10-11 mb/s, I'll hit anywhere from 18-27 with Teracopy.