System Hiccups when transfering lots of small files

henriquecsouza · 03 Apr 2011

Hello guys,

I'm a newcomer to the forums, but I've been having a problem that's been plaguing me for a long time.

Whenever I am transferring a large number of small files of maybe when I am installing a game, for example, my system starts hiccuping and fulfilling simply tasks such as opening Microsoft Word take a lot longer.

The processor usage remains pretty low, and it hardly uses more than 50% of my available memory.

I have bought two 1TB Seagate HD's two days ago and mounted them under RAID0, for I was considering the problem was a faulty HD. The performance of the RAID is where it should be according to HT TACH, but today after installing Armed Assault 2 the same problem happened again.

My system is overclocked to 3.7GHz, and I've tried running everything under vanilla BIOS configuration and the problem still persisted.

I've ran both memory checks from Win 7 and MEM TEST and no problem was found after 3 complete evaluations.

Could it be a processor problem? Faulty Motherboard?

Mike Connor · 03 Apr 2011

It's often the windows copy system that slows things down when transferring files.

Try this instead;

Copy your files faster with TeraCopy

Don't know anything at all about games though..........

Regards....Mike Connor

MilesAhead · 03 Apr 2011

Mike Connor said:

It's the windows copy system.

Try this instead;

Copy your files faster with TeraCopy

Regards....Mike Connor

+1

For large files like video Windows Shell copy is fine. But for many small files the overhead is high per file. In addition to TeraCopy which is good software, there are utilities such as KillCopy and RichCopy both of which are free in their fully enabled form.

RichCopy is more for copying thousands of files. It was the only viable way I found to copy 200000+ files from Windows.old folder over a network. KillCopy is similar to TeraCopy but with slightly different settings.

All have their strengths and are worth checking out.

henriquecsouza · 03 Apr 2011

Hello guys, and thanks for all the tips.

I've just finished copying around 700GB of movie files from by backup drive back to the RAID array and all went fine with no problems.

The only problem I have is in regards to small files, such as when games are being installed.

I've installed Armed Assault and the problem appeared, however, when installing DCS Black Shark I had no problems at all and it all went fine.

I'll try the software and try to rule something else out. I've already crossed out the HD's as being culprits, because the RAID I've build was done with 2 brand new hard drives.

I'm still considering the possibility of it being a faulty motherboard or memory. Could they be responsible for my problems?

Mike Connor · 03 Apr 2011

henriquecsouza said:

Hello guys, and thanks for all the tips.

I've just finished copying around 700GB of movie files from by backup drive back to the RAID array and all went fine with no problems.

The only problem I have is in regards to small files, such as when games are being installed.

I've installed Armed Assault and the problem appeared, however, when installing DCS Black Shark I had no problems at all and it all went fine.

I'll try the software and try to rule something else out. I've already crossed out the HD's as being culprits, because the RAID I've build was done with 2 brand new hard drives.

I'm still considering the possibility of it being a faulty motherboard or memory. Could they be responsible for my problems?

Anything is possible, but it's not very likely. Try the software and see how it works out.

Regards....Mike Connor

MilesAhead · 03 Apr 2011

If you are not actually getting errors then it may be something simple like drive defrag. If you run a disk benchmark you'll notice the MB/s is much smaller for small random chunks than for large sequential reads.

The quickest thing would be open a command prompt and to a defrag with /A switch to analyze the drive.