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Okay so I'm a software engineer and I'm always trying to keep my hardware up to date because my biggest pet peeve is waiting for my system to do something.

So I have the following drives and mobo

  • 1TB Samsung 960 PRO NVMe
  • 2 TB Samsung 970 Plus
  • ROG STRIX z390-E

I just recently purchased that 970 and I'm trying to move 40GB of source code projects from the 960 to the 970. I just selected my source folder, hit ctrl + x, selected my new drive, hit ctrl + v.

Can someone explain this? Insanely slow speed

Still slow even after a while

Its 40GBs... direct hard drive to hard drive I'd expect this to take a few minutes at the most. All this hype and craze about "blazing fast read/write speeds", when do we get to call that false advertising? I would wager that I could plug in an old platter and it would be just as fast for this operation LOL.

But in seriousness, what do I check? Maybe I have BIOS settings that are wildly off? Defective board? To be honest, I've NEVER experienced a noticible speed increase from any hard drive tech upgrade. From platter to SSD to NVMe. It seems like my files copy same speed to day as they did 10 years go. What am I missing?

EDIT: Benchmark results: Benchmark

I mean, they look like it should be insanely fast right? Why isn't it this way in practice?

Joshua Sanders
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2 Answers2

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Small files (like source files) will often present very poor filesystem performance, which is especially noticable when you have many of them to shift...

Regarding the lumpy graph, I'd suggest that the higher transfer speeds (peaks) represent files that are significantly larger, and are thus able to achieve a much higher transfer rate as they can be handled that much more efficiently.

enter image description here

What is the average file size you're dealing with? From your screenshots, I calculate about 110-150KiB (12GiB / 116k, or 39.1GiB / 280k)... however, given my expectations surrounding the larger files, this could be more than an order of magnitude off if you exclude the large files from the calculation.

Your benchmark figures look quite reasonable, and I'd suggest that these speeds are still very slow, regardless of my theorising above.

What else was your system doing at the time?

Attie
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Just to mention: robocopy is much faster than "regular" windows copying. And copying a lot of small files will also be slower than copying large files. If you're not comfortable using command line interface to copy files with robocopy, I've created a tool which lets you robocopy folders from a right-click menu (and includes much more tools for admins): RCWM.

Regarding your copy speeds always being about the same, even when swapping hardware, makes me think it might be a Windows issue - what's your Windows version? It could also be that some program, or a Windows component, is using your C: disk a lot - what's the disk usage as reported by Task Manager? It might be time to format your disk and install a new, clean Windows version.

It could also be a hardware issue (motherboard, cables?), but I doubt it since the benchmark looks okay ...

GChuf
  • 1,327