Extremely slow transfer speed from external hard drive

[bungeeman]

Hi Everyone.

I have recently had to format my hard drive and re-install windows. I have also had to replace the motherboard, CPU and power supply. I borrowed a 1.5 TB Freecom firewire external hard drive from a friend to back-up important data before the format, but the transfer speed is uselessly slow now that I am attempting to put the data back on the drive.

I have tried:

- updating the drivers for the firewire card
- switching to 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller (legacy) in the device manager
- Optimizing the drive for 'better performance' as opposed to 'speedy removal' in the drive's properties.

As things stand at the moment, I am getting about 400 kb/ps transfer speed from the external to my on-board drive. As you can imagine, this is virtually useless to me, considering I have hundreds of gigabytes worth of data to transfer.

Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Night Hawk]

The best option if the external HD offers an eSata port would be to plug the drive in by either an eSata port provided with the case you or by an addon eSata card. Even when backing things up on a drive in a usb enclosure like seeing a full system image made the data transfer rate slows to a crawl.

One example for that was an image made from a 7 laptop to the drive in the external enclosure taking some 3hrs. to finish from a 120gb drive with hardly anything on it and comparing that to an image totally 497gb made to another internal drive on the desktop here only taking about 35min.!

Unfortunately the only other option would be removing the drive from the self contained external casing it came in to install internally like I did with one WD Essentials 500gb model during the beta and RC testing of 7 simply to add in an extra drive. Otherwise you have to suffer with what the firewire bus will allow.

Of course if it did have an eSata port you could also open the side cover on the case while powered down long enough to plug the drive into a port on the board long enough to see everything copied over which would be faster but just a little awkward. Then you would be using the onboard sata controllers.

 

[bungeeman]

Thanks Night Hawk. I'll look into these suggestions.