Copying Music Takes Ages

Blisterman

Whenever I am copying files from my music to an external hard drive, it runs ridiculously slowly, about 1-2mb/s. I am currently backing up my entire 80gb music collection, and at this rate, it's going to take over 24 hours to complete

It's only music that this happens to. Any other folder on my computer copies at
at least 10mb/s.

Looking at the names of the files copying, it seems to take less than a second each for about 80% of the files, then random songs take about 10 seconds each.

Does anyone have any idea why this is? I've tried going into safe mode, and it makes no difference, so I don't think it's a problem with a program.

BostonB

Windows 7 has folder types. Did you try changing the folder type? Maybe it doing some indexing/tagging of meta data with the files. Or even a virus scan.

Captain Chaos

Could be because of the speed of the external HDD or that you have it plugged inot a USB 1.1 port instead of the much faster USB 2 ports.

Copying files from folder to folder on the same system compared to copying from one HDD to another is comparing apples to oranges.

Blisterman

It's worth adding that non-music files, such as iphone applications in my music folder copy at normal speed.

Fysh

Are you copying manually or using a script/application to do it?

If manually, try using SyncToy - I've found it better-suited to such bulk copies (not to mention that if a given file copy operation fails it doesn't take down the whole job, unlike manual copy operations).

BostonB

Lots of Smaller files will always take longer than few bigger files, but there shouldn't be that much of a difference. Sometimes I'll zip something with a lot of small files up before copying it. Even if is the same size.

I use Karens Replicator to synch only files which are different, added, deleted, rather than copying everything.

But I think theres something else going on with your folder.

Capt'n Midnight

would indexing have anything to do with it ?
if using an app that looks to the internet for stuff

is the antivirus scanning them all


*dusts down this advice it's that old*
in older versions of windows you could run out of file handles, so a restart was needed , a restart will solve numerous other little niggles, worth a shot



synchtoy is good, especially if you intended doing this again on a regular basis

BostonB

Does synchtoy still leave index files behind it? I stopped using it for that reason.

LimkUL

Perhaps try TeraCopy http://codesector.com/teracopy