Disk transfer speed slow

[Gwaihir]

Hi,

My system has two Western Digital WD10EARS 1TB drives specced at 3GB/s. When I was transferring some files between these drives I noticed the speed reported was only between 27MB/s and 70MB/s. I haven't really looked at transfer speed until now and then only because I was copying a lot of files and it seemed to be taking longer than expected.

Does anyone know if this transfer rate is typical or, if not, how I might find out what the bottleneck is?

 

[Joseph182]

Its may be not the disk problems.Bcse antivirus is working in the system.so each time transfer of files antivirus is scanning those files clearly and regularly.and it depends on the file.dat files and other types of common and non common files.So a file is large one,it needed more time the antivirus scanning time ratio than smaller files.antivirus is not informing us that it scanning the files while transferring,but there can be an option to deselect.Next point is one disk types,fat or ntfs or other,but i hope no need to overlook this area.Another thing while trasferring those files may be the system is performing other jobs,so it can be another situation to take time.so if there is no disk prob no need to worry.(antivirus scaaning time for transferring files,or computer may performaing other task at the same time,or the usb port transferring capacity)no need to worry.

 

[Gwaihir]

Ok, thanks for that explanation. I hadn't considered the antivirus (MSE) but that sounds very plausible.

The files are/were all NTFS and the only application running at the same time was my email client (Thunderbird). Usually in this state Task Manager shows around 57 processes running but CPU idle time is 99% so I'm assuming it's not the system performing other resource-hungry tasks.

The transfer speeds were between two SATA drives on 3GB/s SATA channels. My USB external drives showed pretty much the same speeds whether on a USB2 or USB3 connection.

I was, in fact, backing up a data partition prior to re-sizing and Windows struggled with the number and/or size of files. The transfer stopped with no error messages and I eventually had to complete it by breaking the job down into smaller chunks.