Transfer rate from internal SATA HD to internal SATA HD slower than to USB HD

[spinbot]

I've just installed a second Hard drive in my PC, formated it and its functioning fine. I moved 250GB of data from an external USB drive over to this internal SATA drive in a couple of hours.

I now wanted to shift about 15GB of data from my primary internal SATA hard drive (exact same 320GB Seagate drive as the new one ) to my new drive. Based on Windows estimated time to completion, its going to take 1 hour .

Any idea why its about 1/10th the speed moving data between the Internal drives versus to the External USB drive? Did I hook something up wrong?
These are SATA drives, so they don't share a common ribbon cable like IDE.

[jolok]

consider eSATA

[RastaManMax]

consider eSATA

USB 2.0's transfer rate is a lot slower than the internal transfer rate. eSATA is just as fast as an internal SATA drive. The only disadvantage with eSATA is that if you want to hook the drive up to something else, (laptop for example).

[spinbot]

USB 2.0's transfer rate is a lot slower than the internal transfer rate.

That is what I figured, so the question is what might be causing my two internal drive to be communicating slower than the USB drive?

[hagbard]

That is what I figured, so the question is what might be causing my two internal drive to be communicating slower than the USB drive?

Good thing you pointed that out for the reading impaired. :lol:

[spinbot]

I may just be a "Windows Thing".

WHen I was transferring the 250GB from External to Internal ( and back ), I moved all 250 as one big drag and drop of multiple folders.

When I did the 20GB from Internal to Internal, I did it as 4 drag and drops.

I just tried moving 20GB again, however this time I moved multiple folders as one big drag and drop and the estimated time for it is 8 minutes.

I have no idea why Windows can't sort out the movement of files better when you are doing multiple drag and drops, but I at least have an answer to my question -- the Internal drives do move as fast -- I just need to select all files and move them at once or sequentially, not concurrently.

[rilhouse]

That is what I figured, so the question is what might be causing my two internal drive to be communicating slower than the USB drive?

check:

-are they sharing the same IDE channel?
- is DMA mode enabled?

[crimsona]

check:

-are they sharing the same IDE channel?
- is DMA mode enabled?

SATA cables are Serial, not parallel... hence the name. There's no sharing of IDE channels anywhere.

And DMA should be automatically enabled, as there are no SATA devices that operate only in PIO mode...

[BB88]

Windows is trying to do it "multi-task" so the HD will be working real hard to move around the head to do different transfers at the same time. It's always better/faster to do it one-by-one. Windows will not do it sequentially since it's trying to carry out its multi-tasking ability.

[squall458]

Are you overclocking and what type of mobo is it? Some nforce3 boards for example are really flaky on SATA when the CPU is OCed. Also, on many boards, there are just certain SATA connectors that work better because of chipset issues. I have 2 SATA drives connected and its always speedy regardless of how many folders, files or how I select them to be transferred.

[ppl4golf]

It really shouldn't matter...but I also did some major copying (~250GB) between SATA drives, the drives didn't like to be on adjacent slots, so I moved one down to the 4th slot and it transferred. The computer is flaky when it was doing the transfer but ended up did the job.

I think it took 2 hours.

15GB jobs should take 10 minutes max.

[spinbot]

I have:

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB SATA2 3GB/S 7200RPM 16MB Cache Ncq Hard Drive

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Dual Core Processor LGA775 Conroe 2.40GHZ 1066FSB 4MB Cache Retail Box ( NOT Overclocked )

Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 ATX LGA775 Conroe P965 DDR2 PCI-E16 3PCI-E1 3PCI SATA2 GBLAN Audio Motherboard

-----

I have 4 plugs on the Motherboard, the "first" being used by my original hard drive. I then plugged the second drive into the next SATA plug below it. I then tried it in the 3rd plug (giving me no different results than the 2nd plug).

The only way things got quicker, was as I mentioned, selecting a series of folders at once, then moving them over. Moving each folder, in "parallel" to each other from the one drive, to the other, resulted the more performance results.

[hagbard]

Slightly off topic (sorry for the hijack), any reason why both of my SATA drives run at DMA mode 5 instead of 6? They're both DMA 6 drives. (I know that in the real world, it doesn't make a difference, but it just seems odd that windows (but not the bios) sees them as DMA5). One is the same as the OP's drive.