newbie file speed question

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NewbieSupreme

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
 
NewbieSupreme said:
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
Click to expand...
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.
 
Thanks for the reply, Michael. So is this the state of affairs in 2006,
that we are still better off going to the command line than using the OS
GUI? Do you know what exactly causes the problems in Windows Explorer? It
just seems that with such a simple operation, and in this day and age, why
would an XP Pro explorer drag/drop not work? Does this mean that XP's
backup utility will have the same problems, if I schedule backups of these
enormous folders?

Thanks again
 
NewbieSupreme said:
Thanks for the reply, Michael. So is this the state of affairs in 2006,
that we are still better off going to the command line than using the OS
GUI? Do you know what exactly causes the problems in Windows Explorer? It
just seems that with such a simple operation, and in this day and age, why
would an XP Pro explorer drag/drop not work? Does this mean that XP's
backup utility will have the same problems, if I schedule backups of these
enormous folders?

Thanks again
Click to expand...
I think that in the hurry to make things "simpler for the masses" they
have forgotten those who want the computer to do what it is best at.
Computers are much better at comparing and moving data than they are at
displaying pretty pictures.
Explorer has no options when copying folders to only move those files
that have changed, at least I haven't found out how. Plus I think all
the fancy animations, etc. just slow down the whole process. It may be
OK for moving a couple of "small" files, but when you have to move
hundreds of thousands of files and directories it chokes.
Using a program like Ghost to make a copy of a drive takes minutes to do
using a DOS interface while copying the same drive using Explorer could
take days, if Windows, in its infinite stupidity, will allow you to. I
hate not being able to copy a file or folder because Windows doesn't
think that I should. Its my file, not Windows!
 
Michael W. Ryder said:
I think that in the hurry to make things "simpler for the masses" they
have forgotten those who want the computer to do what it is best at.
Computers are much better at comparing and moving data than they are at
displaying pretty pictures.
Explorer has no options when copying folders to only move those files that
have changed, at least I haven't found out how. Plus I think all the
fancy animations, etc. just slow down the whole process. It may be OK for
moving a couple of "small" files, but when you have to move hundreds of
thousands of files and directories it chokes.
Using a program like Ghost to make a copy of a drive takes minutes to do
using a DOS interface while copying the same drive using Explorer could
take days, if Windows, in its infinite stupidity, will allow you to. I
hate not being able to copy a file or folder because Windows doesn't think
that I should. Its my file, not Windows!
Click to expand...

Well, I appreciate the input, Michael. As I type this, the xcopy window has
been flying through the copy for about 2 hours no, with no problems as of
yet, and it appears to be nearing the end of the operation, if the
alphanumeric order is consistent. Only one strange thing happened, and that
was a prompt if I was sure I wanted to replace a file with filena~1.psd I
don't know why I saw the ~1 termination, because all the other files (some
with 50 or more characters in the name) went fine, and I don't know why a
file would come across as the same name in the same place. I noted the
name, and will investigate this when the copying's finished. I also found a
test utility to return the read-write speed of this hard drive config, so I
will see if this whole 4-hours for copying 160 GB is reasonable.

Looks like I'll also brush up on my DOS, which I haven't really used except
to resurrect "dead" or otherwise crashed PC's. I gues I'll try and get a
little more conversant with the Old School. I must say, though, it's very
depressing. I do see what you're saying about computers not really being
used for what they're best at anymore. Can't wait for 64 bit computing,
though:>).

Thanks again.
 
Unless I've misread what you wrote you have write caching disabled. That
should only be disabled on external drives. Internal drives should use
caching that will speed up general usage.

Glen P
 
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