Vista file transfer

JerryHandbag

Seriously WTF am I doing wrong. I am trying to backup my hard drive, transferring over 100GB of mp3s, videos and pictures onto external drive that I just bought.

Transfer speeds are in KB and its just telling me that its gonna take 13 HOURS to transfer 7GB of files. I've heard Vista was a bit crap for file transfer but this is taking the biscuit, I calculate it will take a few weeks to backup at this rate. Baffling.

Its a Dell studio laptop, 250gb hard drive, Intel Core2 duo Processor, 3mb ram.

Somebody please tell me Windows 7 is better at this!!

omerin

Don't think its a Vista problem. Is your external drive USB, if so can you plug out other usb devices. May just a re-boot will sort it out?

Fysh

Are you all up to date? I know there were file transfer issues with Vista as originally released, but I'm pretty sure they were sorted by the time SP1 came out.

JerryHandbag

Yeah all up to date, have service pack 2. Have fully subscribed anti virus, did a defrag last week.

Even creating and renaming a new folder takes ages, as well as deleting a file. Im trying to transfer to external drive via fast USB, have tried moving small files (mp3s) as well as zipped files and the transfer times are like 10 times what they should be

I use System Mechanic Professional program to clear out registry, junk etc, and a few days ago it was telling me I had an error on the hard drive, but I did a CHKDISK the other day and I thought that sorted it.

PogMoThoin

What make is the drive? Some of these can be pathetically slow

JerryHandbag

PogMoThoin wrote: »

What make is the drive? Some of these can be pathetically slow

Hitachi LifeStudio model, if you mean the external one....the hard drive on the laptop is a Samsung. Ive tried 2 different externals though, as well as a couple of USB keys and file transfer is painfully slow on each, although less so on the USB sticks.

PogMoThoin

Usb keys are flash memory, they will generally be faster than some drives for small files. Could the source drive fragmented badly?

Run hdtune on both the internal and external drives to see what performance it gives.

If they both seem to have good performance try Total commander (a free file transfer utility thats usually much faster than Windows itself)

Fysh

If you're transferring loads of data you could do worse than use Synctoy - I've found it faster than the normal Windows file transfer process, plus it handles a failure to copy one file much more elegantly than the windows-native process does.

Capt'n Midnight

you can use a utility like hdtune to test the raw speed of the drive

if the curve is horizontal then you are being limited by the USB data transfer rate, if it drops off then it's due to the outer track being longer than the inner ones on a HDD


actually use hdtune or manufacturers utility to confirm the drive is ok

are you sure it's not usb 1.1 ?

JerryHandbag

I think USB 1.1 would be faster than what I'm getting right now!

Its defo USB2 because external drive is brand new and laptop is 1yr old.

Just tried a 500mb single file (movie file) just now using Total Commander and it copied across in seconds, yet I tried a similar file size folder with lots of files and subfolders and its taking ages....seems like it just cant handle large subdirectories. Send everything to a compressed zip folder??

Fysh

JerryHandbag wrote: »

I think USB 1.1 would be faster than what I'm getting right now!

Its defo USB2 because external drive is brand new and laptop is 1yr old.

Just tried a 500mb single file (movie file) just now using Total Commander and it copied across in seconds, yet I tried a similar file size folder with lots of files and subfolders and its taking ages....seems like it just cant handle large subdirectories. Send everything to a compressed zip folder??

Try SyncToy before you go zipping stuff, it might solve the problem. I use it for making backups of my DVD rips and music collection and I'm pretty sure it handles the transfers over a USB2-SATA bridge significantly faster than the standard Windows file explorer does (plus it can handle problems with copying one file without aborting the entire job as a result).