Can't copy large files on Win 10

J

JoK

Weaksauce
Joined
Feb 24, 2017
Messages
97
Hi,
I am puzzled with a situation I am facing on Win 10.

I have a virtual box file in an external drive (~160GB) and the main HD has 250Gb free space.

I try to copy the file to the HD. When the copying starts, a new file of the same size is created in the target location and copying starts. Eventually, the process fails because the HD runs out of space.

I have tried many ways to do this (e.g. cloning the VM) but the same incident occurs.

Anyone knows why this happens? I don't understand why this happens as there is more than enough space.

Thanks
 
What B00nie said.

Also as a good rule of thumb, you don't want to run virtual machine hard drives on the same drive as your Host OS unless it is really fast. And even then, it's just better not to.
 
KarsusTG said:
What B00nie said.

Also as a good rule of thumb, you don't want to run virtual machine hard drives on the same drive as your Host OS unless it is really fast. And even then, it's just better not to.
Click to expand...
I've got a SSD and so far never had any probs. Why is it advisable to avoid?
 
JoK said:
I've got a SSD and so far never had any probs. Why is it advisable to avoid?
Click to expand...

Even with an SSD it constantly fights for I/O bandwidth. You can easily bring your windows to a crawl this way. This is especially true with windows 10 for some reason. Just make a 300 gb vm and load up a bunch of torrents, especially ones with loads of small files. Your windows system will feel like it's running on an atom cpu, even though it's actually the disk that is limiting it. This is still true even with NVME drives.
 
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KarsusTG said:
Even with an SSD it constantly fights for I/O bandwidth. You can easily bring your windows to a crawl this way. This is especially true with windows 10 for some reason. Just make a 300 gb vm and load up a bunch of torrents, especially ones with loads of small files. Your windows system will feel like it's running on an atom cpu, even though it's actually the disk that is limiting it. This is still true even with NVME drives.
Click to expand...
I see. But putting a VM in a mechanical HD is a bottleneck as well. So, better have a second SSD?
 
JoK said:
I see. But putting a VM in a mechanical HD is a bottleneck as well. So, better have a second SSD?
Click to expand...

Ya, almost always. This is especially true if you have a virtual drive that is set to expand as you need it (as 99% are) rather than per-allocating the entire space initially.
 
In my Dell laptop it is hard to squeeze a second ssd. Need to replace the battery. I haven't ever checked if possible to add a second one
 
Update to the efforts to copy the large file: Changing the Temp directories didn't help so I had to move some other files to external disks and then managed to copy the large file.
 
JoK said:
Update to the efforts to copy the large file: Changing the Temp directories didn't help so I had to move some other files to external disks and then managed to copy the large file.
Click to expand...
Yep that was probably a temp limit in there some way some how. Glad you got it done.

As part f the larger discussion. From what I have seen MS and many others have just gotten sloppy with their programming. Everything has multiple processes, sloppy memory management, and lots of junk on the disk. Add to that the security issues and you have a slower than it should be system. Seems like everyone feels they don't have to clean up the code or make it efficient since there is plenty of memory, plenty of drive space, and plenty of CPU time on today's computers.
 
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