Windows 7: does the capacity/used space on USB drive affect performance

trinaz · 11 Sep 2011

Didn't know whether to post here or in Hardware forum...hope this is the place?

Have a 1 T external usb drive used for system & file backups on 2 machines. Lately it seems that the speed to save a system image is slowing down considerably...particularly on the 2nd networked machine ?

The drive is about 80% full now...could this be the reason the performace/time to save/restore an image seems to be growing longer ?

Thanks...TRinAZ

**yowanvista** · 11 Sep 2011

Quote: Originally Posted by trinaz

Didn't know whether to post here or in Hardware forum...hope this is the place?

Have a 1 T external usb drive used for system & file backups on 2 machines. Lately it seems that the speed to save a system image is slowing down considerably...particularly on the 2nd networked machine ?

The drive is about 80% full now...could this be the reason the performace/time to save/restore an image seems to be growing longer ?

Thanks...TRinAZ

Defragmenting that drive might help

Zepher · 11 Sep 2011

As a drive fills up, it starts to use the inner portion of the platters which is slower than the outer portion of the platters.
Fragmentation will also slow the transfers down as well.

HammerHead · 11 Sep 2011

Defragmenting large files such as backups has always been painfully slow for me. I would advise having something else to do while it was working.

maxseven · 12 Sep 2011

Quote: Originally Posted by trinaz

The drive is about 80% full now...could this be the reason the performace/time to save/restore an image seems to be growing longer ?

It's highly likely that this is your problem. IMO it'd be better to delete old backups rather that bother to defragment the drive. I backup *Files* every day (you may even want continuous backup of Files) but full System images really only need to be saved after configuration changes, and then I only keep a couple, three, or four of these, after which I can't imagine restoring back any further anyway.

Windows 7: does the capacity/used space on USB drive affect performance

does the capacity/used space on USB drive affect performance problems?