Drive to Drive transfer speeds. What do you Get?

[Ericmopar]

I've noticed when copying the Railworks folder from my Samsung 830 SSD to my Western Digital Blue 640GB 16MB cache drive, for backups, I never get more than 30MBS transfer speed. They are both internal and on SATA/AHCI
That seems kinda slow to me.
It can take 10 min to copy over my 18GB Railworks folder.
I've also noticed in the device manager, that the IDE/ATA channels 0 and 1 show the drives as IDE channels under device description, although I think that just might be a legacy thing.
Does this seem normal?
Eric.

[arizonachris]

Was gonna download HD Tach but for $49.95, I'll look elsewhere. 10 minutes seems too long for such a relatively small file size. I can backup (copy/ paste) my Railworks folder in less than five minutes, and it's 28Gb. Using two Western Digital Black 500Gb SATA II drives, legacy ATA mode.

[Ericmopar]

Was gonna download HD Tach but for $49.95, I'll look elsewhere. 10 minutes seems too long for such a relatively small file size. I can backup (copy/ paste) my Railworks folder in less than five minutes, and it's 28Gb. Using two Western Digital Black 500Gb SATA II drives, legacy ATA mode.

I have found out it may be becuase my 640GB WD Blue is a little on the old side. It only has a 16MB cache and one platter.
Still seems slow.
An online forum suggested making sure the drives were set to "DMA mode" as opposed to "PIO mode" but the option in device manager isn't even there under the advanced options for the IDE/ATA channels. (like it's supposed to be)

[Ericmopar]

I have also found out...
The current Intel drivers for the AHCI/SATA controller are bunk.
My drive to drive transfer speeds went up 50-100% when I installed the Windows 7 default AHCI/SATA driver during a manual driver pick.
That would be the "Standard AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA Controller"

It hasn't made a bit of difference, except in drive to drive copys. Loading of games and other software seems unchanged.

[arizonachris]

Both my hard drives are set UDMA 6. DVD burner is set UDMA 5. Guess the two WD Black HD's are SATA III. I'll see if I can find a free hard drive speed test utility. Major Geeks is sure to have one.

[Ericmopar]

Nutz...
I'm back on the Intel SATA controllers.
I noticed after some more testing, that the average speed of the default drivers wasn't much faster than the Intel SATA/AHCI controllers. Maybe a minute in real world copy times.
What I was getting that I thought was a large improvement, was much higher burst speeds, but the actual copy times were virtually identical between drivers.
The Windows drivers don't support Intel Rapid Storage Technology either. They also make for a very noisy and busy HDD. The Intel drivers keep the drive activity to a minimum for some reason.

Oh well. It was an interesting experiment and I learned a lot from it. There is a lot more to it than having DMA enabled.
After a lot of online reading, I'm sure it's the C drive's smaller cache and old style single platter.
I changed the SATA cables so I know it's not that either...

[Ericmopar]

Both my hard drives are set UDMA 6. DVD burner is set UDMA 5. Guess the two WD Black HD's are SATA III. I'll see if I can find a free hard drive speed test utility. Major Geeks is sure to have one.

Chris, I'm just using the built in Windows speed monitor. When I'm copying from drive to drive, I expand the window to show more details.

[arizonachris]

Chris, I'm just using the built in Windows speed monitor. When I'm copying from drive to drive, I expand the window to show more details.

I did that as well this afternoon, completely forgot that feature was there. Was making a backup of RW to Documents on the same drive, talk about slow. Never did get to 7Mb/s. I'll do a drive to drive test later, gonna beta test somebody's route later (hence the quick hour long backup)

[Ericmopar]

Chris, I'm just using the built in Windows speed monitor. When I'm copying from drive to drive, I expand the window to show more details.

I did that as well this afternoon, completely forgot that feature was there. Was making a backup of RW to Documents on the same drive, talk about slow. Never did get to 7Mb/s. I'll do a drive to drive test later, gonna beta test somebody's route later (hence the quick hour long backup)

Yeah, large backups going into a folder on the same drive as the original file is usually pretty slow. It has to do with the mechanical limitations of the heads swinging back and forth between reads and writes.

I'm curious now what you'll get for a large drive to drive copy.

Eric.

[arizonachris]

WD says these drives are supposed to sustain 100Mb/s speeds. I just never really cared to check, I suppose. Just set it up and let it run. I'll do some more backup stuff tomorrow after my shift on the Iowa is done (6pm, time for a tall cool drink and a burger with fries, ) (PITA to get the drive part number, Device Manager doesn't let you copy and paste. Had to resort to a pen and paper. How barbaric! )

[Ericmopar]

Barbaric is right.
I don't think there is a print option either.

[Ericmopar]

Update.
I installed a second SSD. I put in a Samsung 128GB 840 Pro because I'm running out of room on the Samsung 830 56GB that I had TS2013 on.
Wow. Drive to drive transfer speed went from 10+ minutes from the 830 to the old WD Blue to 2 minutes between the Samsung 830 and 840s.
I was getting write speeds upwards of 150MB per second.
Considering that would be random reads and writes, that's pretty decent.