Painfully Slow Speed When Copying Files Onto an External Hard Drive


  1. TheDeerDude
    Posts : 206
    Windows 7 x64
       New #1

    Painfully Slow Speed When Copying Files Onto an External Hard Drive


    I decided to do a backup of my data, because I will be formatting my laptop. I'm using a WD elements 1TB hard drive (usb-powered). While it does support USB 3.0, my laptop doesn't. It is half full, still has about 400GB of free space.

    My problem is, when I'm copying any files onto it, the speed drops below 1MB/s and I'm not sure why. Is it because the disk is half full? It is a real pain to copy the files and folders one after another, waiting for each one to finish...

    Edit: For some reason it now copies at 10-20 MB/s...
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  3. Golden
    Posts : 19,383
    Windows 10 Pro x64 ; Xubuntu x64
       New #2

    Copy speed varies depending on the size of the files being copied.
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  4. TheDeerDude
    Posts : 206
    Windows 7 x64
    Thread Starter
       New #3

    Hm, just out of curiosity - which one of these would take longer?

    Thousands of files ranging from KB to MB in size

    or

    a few large 4GB ISOs

    Assuming they take up the same amount of space
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  6. Golden
    Posts : 19,383
    Windows 10 Pro x64 ; Xubuntu x64
       New #4

    It depends on several factors such as fragmentation state of the disk and location of files on the disk, assuming a traditional hard disk. Generally the smaller files will take longer as they are likely scattered across the disk, and the disk head has to do more work to travel to the right location on the disk to read the file and its attributes.
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  7. TheDeerDude
    Posts : 206
    Windows 7 x64
    Thread Starter
       New #5

    Alright, thank you for explaining it to me. It just seemed worrying to get such low speeds on a healthy external hard drive that hasn't been used much.

    Also, your profile picture is amazing - just saying xD
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  8. Golden
    Posts : 19,383
    Windows 10 Pro x64 ; Xubuntu x64
       New #6

    May you be touched by His Noodley Appendage
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  10. bigmck
    Posts : 4,751
    Windows 7 Home Premium 32-Bit - Build 7600 SP1
       New #7

    If this helps, my C: drive is 64 GB and takes about 20 min to backup to an external HD.
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  11. RolandJS
    Posts : 2,774
    Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
       New #8

    Before I do any major backing up, I first defrag the cdrive [OS] partition and then the ddrive [Data] partition. It makes backup a smoother operation. Although there are many defraggers, free and fee, I use Norton Utilities 16's quick-defrag and/or Auslogics DiskDefrag.
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  12. TheDeerDude
    Posts : 206
    Windows 7 x64
    Thread Starter
       New #9

    RolandJS said:
    Before I do any major backing up, I first defrag the cdrive [OS] partition and then the ddrive [Data] partition. It makes backup a smoother operation. Although there are many defraggers, free and fee, I use Norton Utilities 16's quick-defrag and/or Auslogics DiskDefrag.
    Thank you for that tip, I'll give it a try... actually I should just defrag my drives more often too ^^

    For me it's like.. 1gb in 4 minutes, for now.
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