Only getting just under 4 MB/second copying files from Hard Disc

For some reason, the transfer rate on my 2TB Western Digital internal hard drive has dropped through the floor. I'm not sure what has happened but when when I try to copy files on HD I'm only getting a maximum transfer speed of 4MB/second, which is abysmal. For example, as I write I'm doing a test copy of a folder (to another folder on the same drive) containing 90 gig of misc. files. Windows is reporting that this transfer will take around one day to complete!

Can anyone give me a clue as to what might be going on? I error checked the drive and it came up healthy, and in all other areas, it seems to be working fine. All these problems seem to have started since I decided to reformat the hard drive and reinstall Window, a job which I've done on this particular setup at least a couple of dozen times before with no problems at all. I must say though that installing Windows was SLOOOW this time though, a lot slower than normal, and I'd say it took about 3 times as long to do as normal.

Does anyone have any pointers for me as to what the problem might be?

My setup:

Hard Drive: Western Digital WD20EVDS-63T3B0
Motherboard: ASUS P6TD Deluxe BIOS rev. 0608 (latest)
GFX card Nvidia Quadro 3800
CPU: Intel i7 975
12 gb RAM
Windows 7 Home Premium x64

Resource Monitor
Check to see with Resource Monitor (Disk Tab), see which process is using an unusually big Disk Usage, possibly a factor of the abysmal transfer rate.
Also try to defragment your Hard drive: Disk Defragmenter - Open and Use

Thanks for the advice. I'll try both of your suggestions and report back shortly.

mikejb1933 said:

I'm doing a test copy of a folder (to another folder on the same drive) containing 90 gig of misc. files. Windows is reporting that this transfer will take around one day to complete!

Can anyone give me a clue as to what might be going on?

Windows doesn't accurately estimate the time needed to complete.

I regularly do backup jobs that take 2 or 3 hours to complete. During the job, Windows estimate of the time remaining often is as high as a day. It's just inaccurate.

If it actually takes a day to copy 90 GB, that's another story. I normally can copy that amount in somewhere around an hour, maybe less.

ignatzatsonic said:

If it actually takes a day to copy 90 GB, that's another story. I normally can copy that amount in somewhere around an hour, maybe less.

I cancelled the copy shortly after posting my initial message, but I'll do it again later and see how long it actually takes.

In the meantime, I'm not getting very far. I ran resource monitor and there doesn't appear to be any processes eating up very large amounts of disk usage. As for defragmentation, the drive is only 3% fragmented, and besides that, I tried a full format and re installation of Windows but I'm still getting the same slow transfer rates.

I tried Teracopy. This gave me slight improvements on file transfers, but seems to waver between a decrepit 300k, up to 20MS/s with the average rate being around 7MB/s.

Sometimes, when I initiate a copy, for the first few seconds it shows a transfer rate of over 100ms/sec, and stays like that for about 40% of the file copying process, then slows right down again to sun 4mb/sec levels. I have a feeling the drive may be faulty.

I ran WD Lifeguard Diagnostics on the drive and tried to perform a Quick Test on the drive, however after about 10 seconds, the following error message came up:

Test Option: QUICK TEST
Model Number: WDC WD20EVDS-63T3B0
Unit Serial Number: WD-WCAVY0439183
Firmware Number: 01.00A01
Capacity: 2000.40 GB
SMART Status: PASS
Test Result: FAIL
Test Error Code: 06-Quick Test on drive 2 did not complete! Status code = 07 (Failed read test element), Failure Checkpoint = 97 (Unknown Test) SMART self-test did not complete on drive 1!

Does this give anyone any clues?

I'll probably have to try a different hard drive in the machine. I'll make some calls later today and see if I can borrow one for a few hours. :)