Hard Drive Transfer, painfully slow

First off im running windows Vista 64 bit

ok so here the deal, i bought a 500gb usb 2.0 External Harddrive a few weeks ago

and i also bought a usb to ide cable, for my 320 gb internal hardrive on my old pc

so i wanted to transfer the files on the Internal Hardive to the External Harddive
Vista recognizes both Harddrives fine, but when i transfer from my internal to external, it transfers at a rate of 925k/b sec, and so when i try to move 20 gb it says it will take about 10 hrs, i know this i a vista issue

now my question is, is there any program i can use to transfer the files faster?
cause i really do not wanna wait till Vista SP1 comes out for the fix, (God knows when that will be)

another thing, i have a sager np9262, can i add a second bigger internal HD?whats the biggest Notebook HD out there? and where would u recomend i look?

 

Check the properties of those external drives and make sure they are set to "Optimize for best performance". They may have defaulted to "Optimise for quick removal". The latter means that computer is waiting for confirmation that each block of data has been received and written before sending the next one.

This site has links to a couple of Microsoft file transfer hotfixes.

At the moment the highest capacity 2.5" HDDs are 320GB. A 500GB Hitachi is due out shortly but it is 1/2" thick (most notebook HDDs are 3/8") so you would need to check capacity. Alternatively, Samsung say they will release a 3/8" 500GB unit around mid-year.

John

 

I doubt an application can overcome what I think is a fundamental flaw in file transfer. But as John said check settings. But once again I doubt lack of caching would account for such slow speeds. Sorry can't help more. As always though please check device manager and also check drivers, nothing else makes sense.

 

oh cool thanks
that site has a bunch of tips to help
ill try them out tonight when i get home

thanks

 

id like to refresh this topic, so anyone have any more suggestions?

 

Vista Service Pack 1 is released in the middle of March.

 

Is it possible it is running USB 1.1 somehow? Can you run HDTach on the external and see what kind of numbers that gives. I have moved folders that where fragmented and that slows things down but maybe not that much. And as always uninstal/reinstall drivers, if Vista found drivers on it's own look for Vista drivers for external and try those.

 

I agree that running HDTach or HD Tune or the storage device benchmark of SiSoftware's Sandra will help to see whether there is any inherent performance issues it the problem is with file transfer within the OS.

John

 

Unplug any other usb devices other than the HDD

 

I just want to make sure you tried John Ratsey's suggestion to make sure you have it set to 'optimize for speed' rather than quick removal. You do this in device manager, under the policies tab for the drive. I'd suggest checking write caching, too. Just make sure you use the safely remove hardware mechanism so you don't lose data. My firewire drive jumped from about 1.5KB/s to 30+MB/s with that setting.

Oh, and don't use those settings with a file transfer utility like TeraCopy. I tried that, and I ended up corrupting a ton of data. Apparently the safely remove hardware mechanism uses the file transfer system to check if the drive is ready to remove, rather than something lower level like monitoring the bus. The short story is, Windows allowed me to remove the disk before data finished being written from the cache. I guess TeraCopy doesn't report drive usage back to the OS.

But that's ok, I'm getting better speed from SP1 than from TeraCopy.