Transfer between 2 SATA drives, very slow!?

Damien.

Damien.

Damien.

Soldato
Joined
20 Nov 2006
Posts
6,903
Hi,

I have just rebuilt my machine with a new Mobo and chip.

I have a WD caviar black 1TB and a Maxtor 500GB for backup.

Since reinstalling windows, I have noticed the transfer rate between the two drives has gone awfully slow.

Copying a 9GB file is taking 30 minutes at 15 MB/s
 
Selected for both drives mate.

Its funny. It starts off transferring very fast, like 110MB/s the about half way through the transfer it just grinds to a halt and plots away at anything between 2MB/s and 10Mb/s.

Really got me stumped.
 
I've also noticed my pc is pretty much unusable when installing some programs.

Opening things such as "my computer or the control panel" takes forever or locks up the machine for a few split seconds.
 
JasonM said:
Goes without saying but do you have latest SATA drivers.

Do you get delay when copying to both drives, or just one.
Click to expand...

I've installed latest drivers off the Gigabyte website.

To be honest I haven't tried the other way round. Will have a go when I get home and see if the problem is similar.
 
Again, probably another silly question, but did you install the chipset drivers (if needed)??
If you haven't it might be using the crappy Microsoft compatible drivers as it's not identified the devices quite right.
 
PistolPete said:
Again, probably another silly question, but did you install the chipset drivers (if needed)??
If you haven't it might be using the crappy Microsoft compatible drivers as it's not identified the devices quite right.
Click to expand...

Yes chipset drivers are installed.

Driving me crazy because in its current state, the computer is less responsive than my AMD 965.
 
No hardware change atall.

Once the machine was built, I formatted and installed a fresh version of Windows 7.

The secondary drive has a few things on it but this is just music, pictures etc.

They are both installed into the sata 6gb/s slots on the board.

I do have them installed via molex to sata power cable as I bought it pre-braided. I don't suppose them all being on the same power cable could cause a problem?
 
If it was power issue drives would maybe spinning up and down. Anyhow drives don't use enough power to overload a molex connector.

Both drives being on the same controller could be key. I would move the boot drive to the SATA 3 and see what happens. Could still be driver related to the SATA controller.

BTW Presume you have checked BIOS settings not been changed?
 
JasonM said:
If it was power issue drives would maybe spinning up and down. Anyhow drives don't use enough power to overload a molex connector.

Both drives being on the same controller could be key. I would move the boot drive to the SATA 3 and see what happens. Could still be driver related to the SATA controller.

BTW Presume you have checked BIOS settings not been changed?
Click to expand...

I will default the bios when I get home. So if i put the boot on Sata 3 with the secondary and cd drive on sata 2?
 
You mentioned whole machine was running slow. Because of this I would see what happens with boot HDD on another controller.

If you put boot on Sata2 and see if machine speeds up, then if you do your copy of files to the drive already on Sata 3. If machine speeds up, but the bulk copy is slow you know it's related to the Sata 3 controller.
 
JasonM said:
You mentioned whole machine was running slow. Because of this I would see what happens with boot HDD on another controller.

If you put boot on Sata2 and see if machine speeds up, then if you do your copy of files to the drive already on Sata 3. If machine speeds up, but the bulk copy is slow you know it's related to the Sata 3 controller.
Click to expand...

Its hard to explain.

The machine isn't so much as slow.

For example if i try to open up "my computer" whilst installing say iTunes, it'll hang breifly, like 2/3 seconds.
 
This is how my sata ports are laid out.

Could you give me an idiots guide on how my drives should be plugged in.

z68xp-ud3-issd-layout-4.jpg
 
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Ok ive done this just this evening;

Copying 9GB from secondary drive to main drive, transfer rate 8MB/s - 20MB/s

Copying 9GB from main to secondary, transfer rate 80MB/s - 90MB/s

What does this mean?
 
I have experienced exactly this problem, inculding the transient write speed and system stutters during writes to the suspect drive, in this case a relatively new VelociRaptor. Like the issue you describe the transfer was mysteriously smooth during reads. Tried numerous error checks, setting changes, etc with no success but to my embarassment all that was required was to reseat the HDD rack in its hotswap bay and all was well again! So, in short, make sure that it is not something as simple as a loose or defective SATA cable.
 
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Well clearly one of the controllers or HDD's is not performing well.

Can you run a HDD benchmark on each of the disk? Other option would be to copy a large file (something ziped say) to another folder on same drive.

Other thing to check is SMART status on HDD's, but do the HDD benchmark first.
 
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