T&L Publications

Hello there,

Recently i got another hard drive and it's a SATA 6GB/sec interface type drive, 1.5TB.

On copying files to the new drive which is to be used for mass storage, when i go to copy a couple very big files they copy fairly quick. When i go to copy a lot of smaller files like average size 100k, say 10000 of them for a
test, they start out copying about 20MB/sec but then slow down to as little as 5MB/sec and even as slow as
2MB/sec sometimes.

The drive is quite large and formatted to be a single drive, so that's 1.5TB of single drive space.
This is the first time i've ever formatted a drive like this. Normally i format into several smaller
drives before using.

Any idea why the slowdown for the smaller groups of files?

MrAl,

Windows XP does a check for the copied/moved file's presence in the target location. I believe it does this even after you've chosen "yes to all" just in case the target folder's contents change through some other action. It's windows trying to protect you from yourself that's slowing you down. In Windows 7, it's categorically worse, especially when interacting with a shared folder.

xcopy still works and doesn't trip over itself as much between files. Remember the dos commands for using it? Here's the best one: "xcopy /?"

--K