Driver problem. Drive 2 drive transfer slower in Vista than XP

the-void · 22 Feb 2007 at 14:31

Just been copying some large files from one drive to another and noticed that file transfer is slower than it was under XP.

I was getting around 20-30Mbs in Vista and 30-45Mbs under XP. I have checked drives and they are DMA enabled (UDMA 6). I wonder what could be causing the slowdown?

Probably nVidia drivers for my nForce4 motherboard no doubt...

Cosimo · 22 Feb 2007 at 14:34

I’ve not noticed any slow down but there have been quite a few reports of this happening, as you said most probably the drivers.

FrankJH · 22 Feb 2007 at 16:43

Ive seen reports of network transfers taking longer but not drive to drive - thats very interesting Ill remember that.

csmager · 22 Feb 2007 at 17:04

FrankJH said:
Ive seen reports of network transfers taking longer

That's probably down to crummy NIC drivers. Changes to the network stack should mean a significant *increase* in network transfers. We're talking up to 40x in some (read WAN) situations.

FrankJH · 23 Feb 2007 at 07:49

csmager said:
That's probably down to crummy NIC drivers. Changes to the network stack should mean a significant *increase* in network transfers. We're talking up to 40x in some (read WAN) situations.

Spot on - thats exactly what it was about

bledd · 23 Feb 2007 at 09:36

probably windows defender's realtime file scanning, go into the Options for defender and untick the realtime scanning bit, a daily/weekly scan is fine unless you're a total n00b (you don't ever need to scan if you dont do anything dumb)

any AV you're running will also slow it down, but having defender & AV running means each file will get scanned twice

disable av and spyware realtime protection and test the speeds

(possibly turn off indexing service -speeds up file searching)

csmager · 23 Feb 2007 at 10:37

bledd. said:
(possibly turn off indexing service -speeds up file searching)

How?!

bledd · 23 Feb 2007 at 10:44

indexing constantly runs in the background, not 100% sure how/when it does it's indexing, but it might do it as files reach new locations

indexing is dumb, people should just save things in well named folders, you never need a pre-indexed search then

csmager · 23 Feb 2007 at 10:47

bledd. said:
indexing constantly runs in the background, not 100% sure how/when it does it's indexing, but it might do it as files reach new locations

indexing is dumb, people should just save things in well named folders, you never need a pre-indexed search then

It runs at low priority IO (new feature in Vista), meaning that nothing is slowed down when it's running.

The indexer is one of the major improved features in Vista - the ability to find files, find contents of files, find emails, find programs, find anything pretty much instantly. In XP, it was useless... but I'd think twice about turning it off in Vista.