hd to hd copy speeds
 

I just bought a 200 gb Western Digital. Moving around my old data, I discovered how incredibly slow hd to hd copy is. I've got an old computer, (800 MHz Duron, Abit KT7) but still.. Here are my timings on copying 18 files, 100MB total:

P -> Q 1.1 MB/s
Q -> C 2.1 MB/s
C -> P 2.5 MB/s
P -> K 6.0 MB/s

where
C is a 120 GB WD, primary IDE1
P is 1st half of the 200 GB WD, secondary IDE1
Q is 2nd half of the 200 GB WD
K is a 120 GB WD through firewire

Seems like my IDE controller is slow, since transfer times to the external hd is much faster. Copying from the 1st to the 2nd partition of my new drive is as expected slowest, but 1 MB/s is just painful.

What kinda times do you guys get for something like this? Is there something I can do with software or drivers? Also, is there some tool where I can verify what ATA mode the disks are using?

Dumb questions:

Did you check your IDE/ATA controllers for DMA being enabled? If it's set to PIO that could be the problem.


check like so- Control Panel-Syste-Hardware-Device Manager- IDE/ATA Controllers. Hit Properties-Advanced Settings and look at the Current Transfer Mode.

Are your IDE cables ATA 33/66/100 certified or just some crappy old IDE cables? If you don't know either check the cables for some clue or buy some new cables that are certified.

My cable is ATA100. But I see now that the secondary hd uses PIO. Weird.. Could it be that either Win2k or my mobo doesn't support UDMA for +137GB drives?

Alright! I checked my bios, and it was set to "none" for my 200 gb disk. Odd that it showed up in windows at all. I set it to "auto" and it got detected as a 137gb disk. Now the UDMA is on and I have a transfer rate of 6.6 MB/s from P to Q.