Why is moving files from one harddrive to another so slow?

windows windows-vista 64-bit speed file-transfer

29,999

Solution 1

Actually your speed is 10.5 MB/s not 10.5 Mb/s (bytes vs bits). Depending on the age of your system and components and the nature and quantity of files thats not a bad (or at least not uncommon) overall transfer rate. Since you didn't give ANY specifics I'll stop here.

Solution 2

1 - You are restricted in this operation to the SLOWEST speed of your read/writes on either of the drives. If drive A is 100MB/s read and 50 MB/s write and Drive B is 100 MB/s read and 10 MB/s write, you can only copy to drive B at 10 MB/s, no matter how fast drive A is.

2 - Vista copy is slow in general. You can use xcopy or robocopy from the command prompt which will be much faster.

Solution 3

The most common way to slow down any hard drive is to have too many individual streams of data too and/or from it at the same time.

I find and can prove, that copying from one drive to itself is exactly half as fast as from one drive to another, depending on the hardware obviously, equal drives and such.

This is a huge timesaver if you are extracting a lot of data from one drive to another, basically never extract from one drive to itself, it's twice as fast or more to extract archives to a different drive to save half the time.

Some of the newsgroup downloading programs like "grab it" have a 'folders' section where you can specify to download to one folder on one drive, and then extract to a different drive/folder, I find this saves a lot of extract time.

Solution 4

One of the main complain about Vista is the slow file copy or move operations. It seems that it is the new "Remote Differential Compression" who is the culprit.

To turn it off go in Control Panel / Programs and features / Turn on or turn off Windows features and uncheck "Remote Differential Compression".

EDIT: Alternatively, you can install the Update for Windows Vista for x64-based Systems (KB938979) which Microsoft released to address the slow move/compression issue.

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Author by

Jonas

I'm a Computer Science student.

Updated on September 17, 2022

Comments

Jonas over 1 year

I use Windows Vista 64-bit and I have 6GB of RAM. Today I installed a new harddrive, and started with moving 465GB of data from my old harddrive to the new one. This process is very slow, the speed is 10,5 MB per second and I'm not doing anything else on the computer. The estimated time is 12h for this process.

Why is it so slow?
- nik over 13 years
  
  How old is your old drive? Have you checked it with HDTune?
- Jonas over 13 years
  
  @nik: It's a Maxtor DiamondMax 11 500GB SATA 3.0Gb from 2006.
nik over 13 years

I don't see KB938979 addressing this specific condition (support.microsoft.com/kb/938979). And, I don't think a rsync like behavior will be applicable when the target drive is empty to begin with (no previous 'version' of data). I also think this Windows 'move' will not be trying to compress before transfer.
Joe_Rose over 13 years

I am leery of quoting from the developer's website directly in describing something. It indicates that you haven't actually used the product...
braden over 13 years

Additionally, copying/moving files is highly dependent on the size of the files to be moved. Usually, on large file is copied much faster than a lot of files with the same total size.
subanki over 13 years

Well I am using it for years, and I am very well satisfied. A rarely suggest a software if I don't have some personal experience or find anyone thanking that software in some other forum
harrymc over 13 years

But copying a large number of files depends on many other factors.
Jonas over 13 years

You are right, it was a typo by me. But I think that is still slow. The file sizes are around 250-850MB.
Joe_Rose over 13 years

It's good you have! Personally I just like to see what you think from your use of it instead of the text from the webpage. When I follow a link and see the EXACT same description it gives me pause.
nik over 13 years

TeraCopy is good. I am not sure if it will help in this condition (have not yet figured this problem yet). But, if you can give it a try the data will be useful.
subanki over 13 years

@JNK its just that i was going to type those in my words but felt lazy and copied it
Jonas over 13 years

I turned off "Remote Differential Compression" but it didn't help me today when I am transferring another 410GB of data.
Jonas over 13 years

I have now installed Windows 7 and moving back the same data took 2.5h, in a speed of >33MB/s so I think it is Vista that is really slow on this operation.
hotei over 13 years

I moved off Vista to WIN7 as soon as the RCs came out. Have never found a reason to regret that move, and several reasons (like your examples) to recommend it.
Jonas over 13 years

@hotei: I haven't had a reason to upgrade or reinstall my system until now.
Jonas about 13 years

I have now the same problem with Windows 7. I only have a speed of 13-14MB/s. I think this is because of fragmentation. This probably goes away if I install a SSD-drive.
Jonas about 13 years

I now have the same problem with Windows 7, only having speed of 13-14 MB/s when moving large amout of data. I think that disks should be able to transfer data much faster. This seems to be due to fragmentation, I guess. I think that a SSD-drive would be much faster for this things.
Synetech about 12 years

> thats [sic] not a bad What‽ Ten years ago, restoring a compressed disk image with PowerQuest DriveImage ran at 20MB/s, and that was with my old system with old drives. How on Earth is 10MB/s considered good? It may be good for a flash-drive, but for a hard-drive, let alone the OP’s system‽ Granted, restoring a drive image was a continuous write instead of files, but even on my current (and still relatively old and slow) system and drives, I can transfer a bunch of 1GB files between two drives at a smooth 42MB/s and a heavily-fragmented 2.4GB file back at 18MB/s.