HDD transfer speeds vs. benchmarks?

D

Dario D.

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Dec 8, 2004
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Okay, I have 2 fast drives, both with supposed average read AND write speeds of 70-90mbps. (Samsung Spinpoint F1, and Western Digital Caviar something or another, from the same time-period)

Any idea why copying multiple gigs (huge video files) from one to the other only goes at 50mbps? (and copying from one drive to itself goes at 25mbps)

The drives are freshly defragmented, and connected via separate SATA cables (it's not like they're sharing an old IDE cable or anything), and I can't figure out why file transfers have always gone this slow. (not sure about other tasks, since they don't show a speed)
This is on Vista 64.
 
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Yeah. But copying a large file from drive D to itself is ALSO slow (30mbps / 4gb file).
 
Lots of external things can affect actual file transfer speeds vs benchmarks, AV even. Are they both NTFS btw?
 
well copying to the same drive will always be slow cause you got one head doing both the work so it is going all over, drive to same drive will be slow.


what mobo, or controller card are these drives on?

have you run HDTach or HDTune on them?
 
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Impulse said:
Are they both NTFS btw?
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Yeah.

MrGuvernment said:
what mobo, or controller card are these drives on?

have you run HDTach or HDTune on them?
Click to expand...
Mobo is the Asus M2N-SLI. I can't run HDTach (only supports XP), but here are my HDTune benchmarks:

wd7501copy.jpg
 
Your CPU usage looks sort of high, maybe there is something running in the background while you are transferring your data.
 
run HDTach in compatibility mode and choose XP :)

not sure but the F1 seems low for average ithought those drives avg around 80-90mb..
 
Hmm... Can someone else dump some files from one drive to another, and see if the transfer goes much slower than the benchmarked speed of the slowest drive?
 
Haven't benchmarked my drives yet but here are some files going from a WD 1TB Black to a Seagate 1.5TB drive.
copy-speed.jpg
 
i know the windows speed thing can be off sometimes, i often start around 120MB and drop to around 60MB eventually going between Segate ES2 500G drives and sometimes my WD640 drive., all of which can avg 90-100MB easily.
 
Zepher said:
Haven't benchmarked my drives yet but here are some files going from a WD 1TB Black to a Seagate 1.5TB drive.
copy-speed.jpg
Click to expand...


That's silly, the time is still calculating lol. I can show you a 500+ MB/s screenshot too but that doesn't mean it's realistic transfer speed. Average for those drives should be around 80-90mb/s.


OP, you gotta keep in mind though most reviews of the Spinpoint F1 are from the 1TB version which uses higher density platters than your 750gb version, same reason as why the 750gb WD blue or black versions are outperformed by the smaller 640gb versions.

Here's a review of your Samsung 750gb F1 drive.

http://www.we-u.com/?p=132

Looks like it's about the same as yours, so maybe they just aren't as fast as you thought they were? ;)
 
aZn_plyR said:
Here's a review of your Samsung 750gb F1 drive.

http://www.we-u.com/?p=132

Looks like it's about the same as yours, so maybe they just aren't as fast as you thought they were? ;)
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Hmm, I was aware that the 750gb was slower than the 1TB, but only by a very small margin (that's why I bought the 750gb). Could it be that HD Tune just reports slower speeds in its tests?
 
i have a 640GB AALS as my OS drive and 3 640's in raid 0

if i transfer a large file from the single OS drive to the raid array it goes at about 90-95MB/s
 
The HDTune screenshots you posted were for read speeds I believe. Write speeds are typically a bit slower. In any case, if the location the drive is writing to is closer to the center of the disk, then of course, it'll be slower. If you're copying from the Caviar to the F1, then around 50MB/s seems fine. If you're going the opposite direction, it should be a bit faster. Also, as someone else pointed out, your CPU is quite high -- other processes may be accessing the disks.

When I transfer from one 640GB Blue to another, it transfers at around 85MB/s -- neither are system drives, and my CPU usage is 5%.
 
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