Slow transfer speeds from one internal hard drive to another

Hi guys,

I'm having a few issues transferring large files from my storage drive (1TB Hitachi Sata II) to my windows drive (500gb Segate Sata II). When moving a file the speed will drop down to around 1mb/s and sometimes even less (into the kb/s). Moving a large file from the windows drive to my storage drive seems ok though.

I've took a few pictures of the HD tune benchmarks to see if they mean anything to you guys.

Pictures

1

2

3

My spec:

XFX 750w modular PSU
Intel i5 2500k (stock)
Asrock Z68 Extreme4
1TB Hitachi Drive
500GB Segate Drive
Ati 6870
8GB Gskill 1600mhz DDR3

The only thing I noticed is that the secondary hard drive is a dynamic disk instead of a basic format (as shown in picture 3) but I'm not sure how much real world performance that would make if any?

Any help is appreciated

How often are the drives defragged?

I've defragged them both recently so they should be ok

EDIT - Just checked, Windows drive is 22% (10.2gb) fragmented - I'll defrag it anyway, can't be any harm in having a nice tidy disk

Try doing the copy again but this time have Resource Meter open on the disk tab - it's launched from the Performance tab of task manager. That should show you whether there's anything else writing to the c: drive or anything slowing the copy down.

Thanks for the reply.

I've tried copying again and it started of well around 50mb/s but it's now dropped to 12mb/s. The first picture is at 20/mb/s and I'll attach another as it sits now.

20mb/s - Resource Monitor

12mb/s - Resource Monitor

Also tried teracopy because I heard windows explorer is poor but this faired no better - 6mb/s - Tera Copy

I've ordered a new hard drive from OCUK which is on it's way to me as this hard drive is relatively old (doesn't make any noises or have bad sectors etc).

Any help is appreciated

Cheers

EDIT - Copy finally finished at 10mb/s

My drives start well then the speed drops off normal isnt it

I would have thought maybe a small drop would have been ok but this sometimes slows down to a complete crawl for no apparent reason.

I'm not really too sure if I'm honest.

Fitted the new hard drive supplied by OCUK today and tried to transfer a file from my storage drive to the new 1tb drive and guess what.... 1.0mb/s.

Really stuck and disappointed.

Resource Monitor - Clicky

Another with NOD32 disabled - Clicky This one was all over the place, went from 80mb/s to 1mb/s to 10/mbs etc. It was never stable

Any help appreciated

Clutching at straws but are you using the latest chipset/RST drivers from Intel?

Also - try changing the SATA cables.

Just ran the update utility and the only thing that showed up as new was the onboard graphics which I don't use anyway.

I have tried different sata cables and direct power lines from my modular PSU which all result in inconsistent transfer speeds

I was in the process of trying to move all the stuff from the dynamic drive where everything is stored to my new drive to see if that different partitions are to blame but backing up 804gb at 1.0mb/s is a long process lol

Any other ideas?

Cheers

EDIT - Thought it was fixed, changed everything to ACHI mode instead of IDE and it started promising at 72mb/s (stable) but towards the end of the 8gb file it came crashing down to 1.3mb/s :/#

Second EDIT - It's now flying along at 124mb/s and I've not touched a thing besides looking through various forums. I've not got a clue what's going on here.

Third EDIT - Crashed back down to 2mb/s towards the end of the large file and then at the start of the next file it goes back up to 100 or so mb/s but it can randomly just have a speed crash.

Do you think this could have anything to do with copying from a dynamic partition to a basic one?

Have you tried putting the 500Gb HDD on the SATA II controller and the newer 1Gb HDD on the SATA III controller ?
Each HDD having it's own controller might help solve speed issues!?!?

The thing is I'm not sure where the speed issue lies. The speed copying from the 1tb storage drive to the new 1tb was slow at times but also very quick at times. Copying the other way round also varies.

What would be the ideal setup for the hard drives do you think?

Would it be worth installing windows 7 on the new drive on a seperate partition to see if it's the install on my primary that's the problem?

So many random variables its hard to solve but I appreciate any input

Just an update - transferred 200gb earlier at 72mb/s which was good but now I'm trying to move another 400gb and I'm getting 600kb/s

Really don't know what to do with it

Do you have an anti virus/trojan software running? Is windows defender installed & running too (since it is often installed as standard on some versions of windows)?

Could be they are interfering with the files being copied since they are scanning them as they copy. You would see differences at times since most AV software tries to be selective on which files it deep scans, normally by file types to help speed up the process. For instance, anything it detects as an .exe file it will deep scan, but a generic .dat file it will do a light scan over.

If you happen to have a couple of AV or trojan scanning tools installed then this would also slow things down.

Try disabling the AV if you have it temporarily. If the HDD light is showing a lot of activity, yet transfer rate is low in windows during the copy this is often the cause. Fragmentation shouldn't have too big an impact normally.

edit - Also, does it show the 1TB disk as a dynamic disk in the 3rd picture? Any reason for using a dynamic disk rather than a basic one? May also be worth taking the USB stick out in case windows is trying to use it with prefetch and the like.

Hiya mate,

I do have an antivirus running (nod32) but I've actually disabled it and tried the transfer again and while at times the transfer rate is fine it still has a tendency to drop below 1mb/s. I'm not intentionally using windows defender but I will check if its running .

I've defragged all the hard drives that I'm running and that hasn't helped things either, gave me a little more room however so it's not all bad.

I'm not sure why the drive is dynamic if I'm honest. What I'm trying to do at the moment is take all the data from that drive and put it on the new one so I can reformat the other and convert it back to basic to see if that's the issue. With this speed issue though its taking some time.

The flash drive has also been removed, no difference

I wish the problem would be consistent but the drops are so random that it's hard to see what's causing it.

Thanks for your help

Defrag shouldn't give you any more space since all it's doing is rearranging things, not compressing. Checkdisk sometimes finds free space marked as allocated and corrects it though.

Is there anything in the windows event logs (application and system) indicating timeouts, retries or bus resets on the disk controllers? That would indicate a hardware or driver error somewhere.

Also try downloading the HDD test tools from the manufacturers sites, and let it do a full surface scan on each drive (which will take a while) to ensure it's not a fault on the disk anywhere.

If that all checks out then there must be something else kicking in occasionally that's interfering with disk access. Load up windows task manager, select the "processes" tag, click on the "show processes for all users" box. In the view menu there should be a "select columns" option. Choose that and add in the "I/O Other Bytes" column. If there's a process that this level is increasing a lot on it may indicate it's using disks a lot. If any task also jumps in cpu usage this may slow down background/copy tasks too.

So - a few things to check/try if it starts having issues again.

When I'm moving / copying folders and or files from one HDD to another it's never that fast...never was really, ...so I've always taken that as normal ....but when doing it via my SSD ....well thats a whole different story..its on a whole new level .....way way faster

Thanks for the the replies guys.

After reformatting the drive and using a basic disk setup it now doesn't seem to fluctuate as much so I'll keep my eyes on it and if it starts acting up again I'll try the above.

Thanks for all the replies guys, appreciate it

The reason could be that some files/folder are the cause of your slow transfer rate. Compassed files can take a hit on transfer speed.