Solved Another slow file moving story

[DCSeven]

My Internet searching brought me here because this site had the closest answer to my problem. I see other people have complained about file transfer speeds in Windows 7 but, the best I can tell, their problem had to do with network drives. My problem is slow speeds between my stack of internal hard drives so I'm not sure if the solution for network issues would apply to me.

I do a ton of video editing, so my folder sizes always measure in gigabytes. When I copy or cut and paste a folder, the transfer speed always starts out anywhere from 90 to 120 MB/s and it slowly drops and drops to something like 35 MB/s. Right now I'm moving 90 gigs, it's about 30% done and I'm still looking at an hour to go. Until a month ago, this was an XP machine and it was never this slow. If my motherboard hadn't gone belly up, it would still be an XP machine. Is this a known W7 issue or what? Are there any reg hacks or other things to look at to speed things up here?

Windows 7 Ultimate x64
Intel Core i7-4790K Devil’s Canyon Quad-Core 4.0GHz
Asus Maximus VII Hero Motherboard
G.SKILL Trident X Series 16GB DDR3 2133
CRUCIAL 512GB 2.5 MX100 SSD Boot drive
4x Seagate 2TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB
4x WD 2TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB

 

[logicearth]

Why do you think it is slower? Large file transfers like you are doing are going to hit the wall on the max sustained transfer speed. Understand, hard drives are only fast during the first part of the transfer this is because HDDs work in burst thanks in part to their cache. (64MB for your drives)

So the beginning part of the transfer is fast then it slows down, why? Because at the start Windows is sending the data to the cache on the HDD which then gets flushed onto the physical platters. However the cache fills back up faster then the HDD can write the data. Your slow down is the physical limitations of the HDD, software will not over come that.


As for why it might have been faster in Windows XP....I doubt it was. XP hid a lot of data going on the back end, and was never accurate. XP would tell you the transfer was complete even if the HDD was still writing the buffer in the cache. This lend to data corruption and data lost when users unplugged thinking it was done.

(Please forgive misspellings and poor grammar, on phone)

 

[Ztruker]

Have you tried TeraCopy? Supposed to be faster than the built in copy. Worth a try.

 

[whs]

Don't get fooled by the 6GB/sec rating. That means nothing. The transfer speed is what the platters allow. Make a test with HD Tune. That will tell you the capabilities of your disks. It will also show the degradation over time.

HD Tune website

 

[DCSeven]

logicearth - Thanks for your input. I'll be the first to admit that I'm a wannabe geek. I'm a semi-old guy, self-taught when it comes to computers, and really know just enough to build a decent computer and get in over my head. Still learning as I go along... I can't say I remember any issues with XP corrupting data from disconnecting a drive too soon, but that could have just been luck on my part.

Ztruker - No, I haven't, but that'll be something worth taking a look at. Thank you.

whs - Also something I'll be checking out. Thank you as well.


I guess I can mark this as solved.