Slllllloooooowww SATA performance

Can anyone help with an annoying problem!

A system we built to act as a server is going really slow copy from one
SATA device to another.

Motherboard is a Gigabyte 965QM-DS2, with 6 SATA drives connected. One
is a 120GB holding Windows, the other 5 (500GB's) are for storage. All
the drives are connected directly to the motherboard. The drives
(excluding C are all mounted in numbered folders in C:.

System is running XP, with the latest SATA drivers installed from the
Gigabyte site.

Copying one 35GB file from one drive to another takes 3 hours! Windows
guesses at 180 minutes, it'll chop and change a bit at the beginning,
but where you'd usually expect the time to drop, it doesn't. 3 hours
probably isn't far off the mark!

There doesn't appear to be much difference when copying between any of
the different drives.

I'd expect minutes rather than hours for this operation?

"harry" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> Can anyone help with an annoying problem!
>
> A system we built to act as a server is going really slow copy from one
> SATA device to another.
>
> Motherboard is a Gigabyte 965QM-DS2, with 6 SATA drives connected. One
> is a 120GB holding Windows, the other 5 (500GB's) are for storage. All
> the drives are connected directly to the motherboard. The drives
> (excluding C are all mounted in numbered folders in C:.
>
> System is running XP, with the latest SATA drivers installed from the
> Gigabyte site.
>
> Copying one 35GB file from one drive to another takes 3 hours! Windows
> guesses at 180 minutes, it'll chop and change a bit at the beginning,
> but where you'd usually expect the time to drop, it doesn't. 3 hours
> probably isn't far off the mark!
>
> There doesn't appear to be much difference when copying between any of
> the different drives.
>
> I'd expect minutes rather than hours for this operation?


It depends what and how old file was...
I wouldn't attribute it to the hard drive.
There may be something else.

In article <(E-Mail Removed)>, harry
(E-Mail Removed) says...
> Can anyone help with an annoying problem!
>
> A system we built to act as a server is going really slow copy from one
> SATA device to another.
>
> Motherboard is a Gigabyte 965QM-DS2, with 6 SATA drives connected. One
> is a 120GB holding Windows, the other 5 (500GB's) are for storage. All
> the drives are connected directly to the motherboard. The drives
> (excluding C are all mounted in numbered folders in C:.
>
> System is running XP, with the latest SATA drivers installed from the
> Gigabyte site.
>
> Copying one 35GB file from one drive to another takes 3 hours! Windows
> guesses at 180 minutes, it'll chop and change a bit at the beginning,
> but where you'd usually expect the time to drop, it doesn't. 3 hours
> probably isn't far off the mark!
>
> There doesn't appear to be much difference when copying between any of
> the different drives.
>
> I'd expect minutes rather than hours for this operation?
>
Have you tried mounting the drives conventionally with drive letters to
see if it makes any difference?

harry wrote:
>
> Copying one 35GB file from one drive to another takes 3 hours!
> Windows guesses at 180 minutes, it'll chop and change a bit at the
> beginning, but where you'd usually expect the time to drop, it
> doesn't. 3 hours probably isn't far off the mark!

Someone else suggested mounting the drives conventionally. Other than
that, check the fragmentation of the file with the XP defragger - if it
has around 15 fragments per megabyte, 180 minutes is about right. This
also applies to the free-space fragmentation on the destination drive.

If for some reason you were actually copying drive-to-drive over a
100mbit network, 180 minutes would also be about right.

If none of these apply, you may have a cable or driver issue.


--
John Jordan