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I am doing a disk to disk copy on a PC and the transfer rate is surprisingly slow. It is a Windows XP machine, which means the operating system is faster than newer generation Windows LOL (the funny part is that I am not even kidding, the XP machine is literally faster than my Windows 10 machine, is it funny or just sad?).

I am using Multi Commander to do the transfer.

Both of the drives are normal hard drives of sizes of about 500 GB.

Many of the files are relatively small, between 50 KB and 500 KB, but some files are megabytes in size. The total number of files is about 1.2 million and the total size of the transfer is 54 GB.

According to Multicommander, the average speed is 304 KB/s which seems incredibly slow to me and is taking literally days to transfer the 54 GB required. It seems like the small files are the problem because most of the time the transfer speed is listed as 4 or 8 KB/s which is INSANELY slow. I think the speed just increases exponentially when a larger file is transferred. So, if this is indeed the problem, a 4 KB/s speed on small files, what could be causing this?

Tyler Durden
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1 Answers1

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1.2 million files totaling 54 GB is 45 kB per file on average.

The filesystem overhead is very big and both HDDs have to seek a lot. Seeking is super slow on HDDs. And that's it.

How to make it faster:

  • Use an SSD for target
  • If the source contains only these files, consider cloning the disk instead of copying them
  • Archive these files instead of copying them. Even tar will work, because the goal is to write a single 54 GB file to target rather than a lot of tiny files.
gronostaj
  • 58,482