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?
try use teracopy...free edition
Copy your files faster with TeraCopy
Last edited by fanec75m; 09 Aug 2010 at 14:23.
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.
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?
I heard using the DOS command robocopy is good
I don't know how to use it cause I would love to.
Last edited by pacinitaly; 02 Sep 2010 at 07:41.
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).
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?
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