How to copy files between two hard drives faster?

[unifex]

I attach a screenshot that is in fact the question. It shows that the speed of file copy operation between two different hard drives is about 20 MB/s. Same operation between different partitions on the same physical drive goes at twice the speed. This is way slower that the theoretical SATA speed of 3 Gb/s. Any suggestions of how to speed this up?

 

[Zepher]

lots of small files transfer slower than large files.
Are both drives internal SATA?

 

[unifex]

Are both drives internal SATA?

Yes, they are.

 

[fanec75m]

try use teracopy...free edition
Copy your files faster with TeraCopy

 

[housry23]

The 3GB/s Sata speed is irrelevant in this issue. It is all about your particular drives Read/Write speeds. Teracopy may speed it up some, but your drives are limited. If it is the same drive just different partitions, several things can cause it to copy slower from one partition to the other like fragmentation, partition size, file size. If you want top speeds when copying and moving files SSD's have the fastest Read/Write, Random Access times and depending on which SSD you get, some are faster than others. There are many factors when it comes to hard drive speed. Hard drives have always been the bottleneck to fast system until SSD's came out. Now the hard drive doesn't hold back the system as much and the technology in this field is expanding rapidly.

 

[Dinesh]

+1 for Copy your files faster with TeraCopy

 

[unifex]

The 3GB/s Sata speed is irrelevant in this issue. It is all about your particular drives Read/Write speeds.

Here's what I find on Samsung's web site regarding my drive :

Performance Specifications
Performance Specifications Average Seek time(typical) 8.9 ms
Data Transfer Rate / Media to/from Buffer(Max.) 175 MB/sec
Data Transfer Rate / Buffer to/from Host(Max.) 300 MB/sec
Average Latency 4.17 ms
Drive Ready Time(typical) 12 sec


How would that limit the possible file copy/move speeds and to what?

 

[pacinitaly]

I heard using the DOS command robocopy is good

I don't know how to use it cause I would love to.

 

[cluberti]

Robocopy or xcopy would be faster than using the shell, but not by much. If you're seeing drive-to-drive copy speeds of only 20MB a second, either you've got really poorly partitioned drives or one of them is just slow (or has a problem). Also make note that many vendors will quote transfer speeds from the disk *to or from cache*, which is not going to make much difference if there are lots of small files being copied (it might make a difference for one large sequential read or write, but smaller reads and writes aren't going to benefit much from larger disk caches).

It would be interesting for you to run a benchmarking utility against the drives, like HDTach or SiSoft Sandra, and see if one vastly outperforms the other, or if one falls down reading or writing a specific file pattern (size, location on disk, etc).

 

[unifex]

OK, I was on vacation, but now I have downloaded Sandra Lite and HD Tune and got some benchmarking results.

I have two drives, the original system drive Samsung HD501LJ and the second drive added later Samsung HD103UJ.

Here are the Sandra results:

Read speeds: 95.42 MB/s (103UJ) vs 65 MB/s (501LJ)
Write speeds: no answer, error message - "remove all partitions and try again", not that I would actually do that.

The HD Tune results for transfer rate:

103UJ: Max. 119.8 MB/s, Min. 54.4 MB/s, Av. 93.7 MB/s
501LJ: Max. 80.7 MB/s, Min. 38.5 MB/s, Av. 64.3 MB/s

So I guess you were right, the two disks are rather different in their performance. However, still much better than 20MB/s, right?

 

[unifex]

Now, I have just moved a large (4.3 GB) file between two partitions on the same disk (Samsung HD 103UJ). The speed was around 31 MB/s, then towards the end became 35 MB/s.

You mentioned bad partitioning of disks. What did you mean exactly?

 

[cluberti]

Drives that contain partitions not aligned to storage track boundaries (on most disks, this is diskpart using align=64), and/or are formatted using incorrect (or poorly-chosen) cluster sizes based on the type of data to be stored (8-16K clusters for volumes storing lots of small files, 64K clusters for volumes storing large files or meant for large sequential file copy operations). Windows 7 by default formats NTFS with 4K clusters, and aligned at 1024K, which is fine for OS disks (relatively speaking), but is likely not going to be fine for storage volumes (or heavily-used disks).

 

[karlsnooks]

Uniflex,
Robocopy is excellent, very solid, very fast, used by many network administrators.

Robocopy has more power and features than the earlier versions thereof.

 

[unifex]

I think that when I bought the second disk I simply used the Windows 7 tools to partition and format. I looked now briefly at how to re-partition, but the Shrink tool does not seem to have options that advanced. Any suggestions on a (hopefully free) good disk management app? And while we are at that, I think I can take all the data away from a drive, re-format and put the data back in, but can I do the same with the OS without re-installing?

 

[stereo]

Right now i copy about 6 GB from the HDD - WD 6400 AAKS, to USB stick.
The copy speed is 4.42 MS/second
Isn't that to slow ??!! Can i improve the speed ?
The files are small, about 30 MB, each.
When i copy some bigger files from onn HDD to another ( i have 2 HDD WD 6400 AAKS ) is much faster.
Thanks.

 

[cluberti]

First, it's good to keep in mind that USB is a "bursty" bus, it's not meant for sustained file transfer - if you want external transfer speeds that are consistently high, you use Firewire. Of course, I don't know of many fireware memory keys .

With that said, USB keys have their own speed limits based on the type of memory inside, and how it's ordered. Back to your numbers, 4.42MB/sec is ~35.5Mb/sec, so you need to know what the maximum transfer speed of that USB stick is. I'm betting it's probably between 35 - 40Mb/sec, as most non-HDD USB devices I've seen are not rated much faster than that.

 

[sbrads]

Right now i copy about 6 GB from the HDD - WD 6400 AAKS, to USB stick.
The copy speed is 4.42 MS/second
Isn't that to slow ??!! Can i improve the speed ?
The files are small, about 30 MB, each.
When i copy some bigger files from onn HDD to another ( i have 2 HDD WD 6400 AAKS ) is much faster.
Thanks.

4.42Mb/s is likely due to the USB stick, lots of them only reach that sort of speed. You have to pay a bit more for decent speeds of 20Mb/s+.

Your HD speeds being a bit low is probably mainly due to copying lots of small files, this really hits HD performance just about always. I would run ATTO disk benchmark (|MG| ATTO Disk Benchmark 2.46 Download) as it does read&write benchmarks at small to large file sizes.

 

[karlsnooks]

I think that when I bought the second disk I simply used the Windows 7 tools to partition and format. I looked now briefly at how to re-partition, but the Shrink tool does not seem to have options that advanced. Any suggestions on a (hopefully free) good disk management app? And while we are at that, I think I can take all the data away from a drive, re-format and put the data back in, but can I do the same with the OS without re-installing?

Use Partition Wizard.

You will not need to re-format your drive.

Free Download Magic Partition Manager Software – Partition Wizard Online

 

[unifex]

I'd like to add, that these problem seem to be confined to internal disks, strangely enough. I have an external hard drive connected via eSATA, and transfer rates to and from this device are way higher that between internal disks. This does not make sense at all. We are talking about same internal disks - with or without their formatting problems, but why would a transfer rate from the external drive be higher then between different partitions on the same internal drive?

 

[pacinitaly]

can't wait to read