Speed for copying/cutting files decreasing?

[Flogger23m]

Over the last few days, it seems as though the speed for copying files on my hard drive has gotten slower.

I have one hard drive installed, just copying files from a folder to another place, such as the desktop.

Now it takes around 40 or so seconds to copy a 3GB folder with around 20 video clips in them.

Even a few weeks ago, the copy/paste of the same folder was nearly instant. Took maybe 2-3 seconds to copy it.

Hard drive is a WD 1TB FALS SATA hard drive.

OS is Vista 64bit Home Pre.

The only changes to my system was that I temporarily added a Seagate 750GB hard drive as a slave/data drive last week.

Anyone know what might cause this?

Doing the basic things like a defrag and scanning for viruses, but if the problem still exists, anyone have any idea what might be wrong?

 

[jiminator]

is the drive filling up? one potential cause might be that the allocation table is on the outside of the disk platter while the new files are getting written to the inside. this then causes a lot of seek time as the drive heads have to move repeatedly from the inside to the outside. I would expect caching to help somewhat but there may be limits there.

 

[drescherjm]

3GB folder
<snip>

Took maybe 2-3 seconds to copy it.

That is unusually fast. I mean at 120MB /s you can copy at most 360MB to a second WDC black or similar drive in 3 seconds. And that is assuming an unrealistic rate for a mechanical disk drive. Are you sure you did not move the files on the same drive the first time?

 

[Flogger23m]

is the drive filling up? one potential cause might be that the allocation table is on the outside of the disk platter while the new files are getting written to the inside. this then causes a lot of seek time as the drive heads have to move repeatedly from the inside to the outside. I would expect caching to help somewhat but there may be limits there.

Drive is around 75% used, but it been like that for 3 or so months.

But I guess freeing up some more space can't hurt (and 1TB is so small... ).

That is unusually fast. I mean at 120MB /s you can copy at most 360MB to a second WDC black or similar drive in 3 seconds. And that is assuming an unrealistic rate for a mechanical disk drive. Are you sure you did not move the files on the same drive the first time?

Sorry, probably closer to 10-15 seconds.

I changed my example from a 1GB to 3GB folder mid post.. forgot to correct. 1GB used to take a few seconds, while 3GB would take around 10-15 seconds.

Same folders in both instances though.

Even copying a 100MB folder with a few large video files (20MB or so each) now takes around 6-8 seconds.

 

[drescherjm]

This is probably the result of having used 75% of the drive. Drives are much faster on the outer tracks than the inner tracks.

Also are you defragmenting your drives?

I recommend mydefrag

http://www.mydefrag.com/

 

[drescherjm]

Sorry, probably closer to 10-15 seconds.

I changed my example from a 1GB to 3GB folder mid post.. forgot to correct. 1GB used to take a few seconds, while 3GB would take around 10-15 seconds.

1GB should take around 10 seconds on the fastest drives assuming you are copying from 1 fast drive to a second fast drive. 3GB should take 3 times that. 3GB in 10 to 15 seconds is not possible for a single hard drive. You need a raid to achieve that.

 

[danman]

That is unusually fast. I mean at 120MB /s you can copy at most 360MB to a second WDC black or similar drive in 3 seconds. And that is assuming an unrealistic rate for a mechanical disk drive. Are you sure you did not move the files on the same drive the first time?

A Cut/Paste should be instant as it's just updating the pointer records. A copy will take a while.

 

[Flogger23m]

A Cut/Paste should be instant as it's just updating the pointer records. A copy will take a while.

Just tried it now, cut/paste still isn't instant. Definitely faster than a copy/paste, but it is no longer instant.

 

[jiminator]

no, the point is that a move on the same drive is instant since only the directory entries are changed. a move to a different drive will take time as the files actually have to be copied.