Is there a less time consuming way to do this?

[tboneman2]

What I'm doing is making room on what is now an external hard drive (used to be C drive on my old computer). I've already transferred 11 gig of download files I want to keep, to a flash drive. It took 5 hours to do it. The point here is, make room for a backup of the Win 7 computer on the external drive.

Next step is to transfer 33 gig of files from the XP (external) drive to Win 7. Then delete the 33 gig from the external drive. Once done, I should have 44 gig additional space on the external drive to use for the backup. (total 95 gig free of 245 gig on the external drive)

The issue is the amount of time it takes to copy, then delete files from the external drive. I have fast copy programs but they are far from instant. Don't 'spose there is such a thing.

Is there a utility out there that can do all of this in a hurry? ("in a hurry" as in, faster than Win 7 does it).

Appreciate your thoughts.

Wes

 

[linnemeyerhere]

tboneman2,
Welcome to SF. Speeds will vary with the hard drives and connections like USB 2.0 vs 3.0 or esata but aside for those the CPU and system speeds your just talking about a lot of data and I would rather get the info transferred properly once.

 

[tboneman2]

So I guess the answer is, not really a faster way. Thanks for your input.

 

[tommyg562000]

Well there is no way to speed up the disk or interface but there are more intelligent data transfer programs. Give teracopy a try, I believe it is by codesector. When installed it will integrate into windows Explorer and automatically take over move, copy and past functions.

 

[Xearion]

The thread name is not good and not many people is going to help you by that.

 

[lehnerus2000]

Quick Format?

A "Quick Format" of the external HDD may be faster than deleting the files.

 

[tboneman2]

Formatting the drive is not the solution, as I have a lot of programs and data on that drive I want to keep.

 

[strollin]

Most flash drives are pretty slow when it comes to writing data, they perform better when reading. If either your external drive or your flash drive are USB 2.0 then you are limited by USB 2.0 transfer speeds. Performance would be better if your flash drive was USB 3.0 (plugged into a 3.0 port on your computer) and your external was using USB 3.0 or eSATA.