What's a normal copy speed between 2 internal hard disks?

Question

I have a PC with 2 internal SATA 7,200rpm harddisks: one is a 1TB western digital, the other is 750GB. I'm copying data between them - but seems to be very slow: e.g to copy 140GB takes about 5 hours.

Does this seem reasonable?

Thanks

Answer 1

In your comment on sblair's answer you stated that:

however I believe that it is being zipped on the fly, then unzipped on the other disk.

This is the most likely cause as to your low speed.

Answer 2

Perhaps a badly fragmented disk, a failing disk, encrypted disk (or folders), or compressed folders?

Answer 3

That's an average of about 8MB/s, which is much slower than I'd expect. Was it mostly lots of small files? Are they both SATA 3.0GB/s drives? Was another program running, such as a virus scanner? Did you copy the files in one go (one single copy and paste command), or did you have several copy operations running at the same time? These are some of the obvious questions anyway...

Answer 4

Copying a single large file between two WD Caviar drives amounts to 85 MB/s for me. Both drives are connected to the SATA ports provided by an NVidia nForce chipset motherboard.

If the source drive is badly fragmented (typical if it is nearly full and has been used for a long time), this can slow down reading speed.

If the data you're copying consists of a large number of small files, this can drastically reduce performance. The slowest part normally is the creation of files on the target disk because each time a file is created, the OS circumvents caching to ensure the updated file system tables are written to disk.

For backup purposes, it helps to zip or rar with no compression from one hard drive to the other. Making a backup of 10 GB of small files (to an SSD with 0.1 ms seek time even) takes me 1 hour 30 minutes of copying. Using RAR with 'store' compression, the same backup takes 2 minutes.

Answer 5

Is this connected to the motherboard's controller (and do you know what kind it is?). From reasonable SATA disks you should be getting 60MB/s at a minimum for reading/writing. This means each disk should be using ~500mbit/s of bandwidth, and SATA goes up to 3GBit/s, so you're not even close to maxing out the bandwidth.

There are three things that could be slowing this down. One is the OS/copy method (I assume you're using Windows copy, try with a program like Total Commander, and see if it's faster). It could be a controller issue, as said above (on a nice fast Adaptec card, you can do much better than on a poor motherboard one). As said, it could be a fragmentation issue. It could also be a sign of a failing drive. Run HDTune in benchmark mode on the disks, and see what read/write you can get on each, and post the results. You should also run a scan for bad blocks, as that can highlight issues.