Re: newbie file speed question

NewbieSupreme wrote:
I searched te ng's for comments about this, but found only people looking for benchmark software. I realize everyone's system is diferent, but I just wanted to get a general idea as to whether my system is performing nominally or not.

I have:

- ASUS SK8V-UAY mobo
- AMD 64FX-51 processor
- 1Ghz Corsair RAM
- 2 SATA 250 GB Western Digital Hard drives, wired to VIA SATA ports on Mobo (1st SATA drive has OS on it) - formatted NTFS, grayed out in properties on choice of favoring performance (write caching disabled, I believe). System restore is monitoring the OS drive, not the other one
- 1 IDE 100 GB Western Digital on primary IDE on mobo (not really part of all this)
- Windows XP Pro, all current patches/packs etc. installed (again, on one of the SATA drives)

I'm trying to get a feel for the file transfer speed between these SATA drives. It seems that things aren't going very quickly. Using Windows Explorer Drag/drop, I have copied an 11 GB folder (several thousand files in a few thousand folders), a 24 GB folder, and a 160 GB folder. Files are all kinds; large high-res photoshop files (~600 Mb), video files (700Mb to 1.5 GB), disk-based webs, all kinds of files from about 7 years of PC use. I have disabled Norton';s auto protect while doing these copies.

The 11 GB took over an 90 minutes, with seemingly exponential time increase for the 24 GB. The 160 copy actually froze the PC: all the icons disappeared from the desktop, along with the START bar, and the mouse worked, but Cntl-Alt-Del didn't do anything, there was no hard drive activity; this happened after about 2 1/2 hours of the files copying.

Does anyone have any general overall notion about how long it should take for various file transfer sizes between these 2 SATA drives? I'm just looking for averages with similar setups. As long as I'm asking, is there some kind of limit on file/folder counts or sizes for copying? I'm a little worried that the 160 GB froze the PC. I know it's a lot of info, and there are millions of files in hundreds of thousands of folders, but still; and this is all coming off a very fresh install of OS and drivers, the PC's running only a few days, and I'm putting all my data on it from past backups to external drives.

Any help, tips, ideas, etc. greatly appreciated. If this should go in a different newsgroup, please direct me.

Thanks for reading and for any comments


Have you tried using XCOPY from a command prompt to copy the files? I found that using Explorer for backing up hundreds of thousands of files in a large number of directories could take several days. XCOPY did the same thing in a very short period of time, and if I told it to ignore unchanged files was even faster.
.

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