Transfer speeds between hdd's

[Ferinthul]

Hey guys, so I'm moving stuff over to a seperate hard drive cause I think my primary is dying.

it runs at 50 degrees when its moving stuff over. And the highest speed ive seen from it is 45 MB/s, but that lasts for a little bit and then diminishes to 9 MB/s, sometimes even 3 MB/s.


My rig consists of the following

Phenom 2 1055t 2.8ghz
2 sticks of 2 gigs of 1333mhz mushkin silverline ram
990 UD3 gigabyte mobo
x2 Gts 450 (sli)


Edit: Running windows 7 ultimate x64 bit
and my primary hard drive is a very old blue caviar, its around 8 years old. Has 250 gb. 2nd is a seagate barracuda 7200.10 320 gb.

Oh and im using sata 2 for my hdd's

So my questions are:
Is it normal for a HDD to have temps of 50 degrees?
Is it normal to have transfer speeds of so low?

Thanks for any help guys!

 

[Ferinthul]

Could anyone help me out? I'd really like some expertise on this situtation.

 

[unksol]

if you are wanting to replace the original drive with the 2nd you would be much better off cloning it to the new drive. it would probably.be faster... plus if you think the drive is dying you need an OS on the new one anyway. unless you installed the OS there and are now moving files.

there is nothing wrong with 50 degrees under high use. there is nothing wrong with transfer speeds that slow when moving small or fragmented files.

 

[Ferinthul]

if you are wanting to replace the original drive with the 2nd you would be much better off cloning it to the new drive. it would probably.be faster... plus if you think the drive is dying you need an OS on the new one anyway. unless you installed the OS there and are now moving files.

there is nothing wrong with 50 degrees under high use. there is nothing wrong with transfer speeds that slow when moving small or fragmented files.

The drive is 0% fragmented and the files are big, I just finished transferring my steam folder over, whcih was 90.9 gigs, and i got an average of around 8 mb/s. 50c seems a bit high under the pressure and the hard drive runs at 45c idle. I also notice that loading times for certain games are long and i read somewhere that it could be the hard drive speeds and such.

Thanks for replying btw

 

[unksol]

if its an 8 yearold drive I don't personally find it terribly abnormal. slow and annoying yes but if you aren't getting read errors, and you are replacing it anyway I wouldn't worry. I wouldn't trust an 8 yearold harddrive (or any single harddrive for that matter) with anything irreplaceable.

i think the normal hard drive temp limit is 60 and case ventalation will affect it. you can always pull the side and point a fan at it to see if its the problem. how many files were in those 90.9 gigs is the real question? small files = lots of seek time and bouncing around. the folder size doesn't really matter.

It still sounds like you'd be better off just cloning it. there are also some harddrive read/write tools you can download and run if you want to compare the speed of the old and new drive.

hdtune is one. has a free version. and a trial version.

www.hdtune.com/download.html

I can't think of any others at the moment since I dont usually bother with them but I am sure there are more.

 

[unksol]

also what games are slow to load? Harddrives have an effect, but I see you only have 2 gigs of ram. I think you'd find more would help. 4 gig and 8 gig kits are dirt cheap now too, and with 8 you can probabaly turn off the page file completely

 

[Ferinthul]

if its an 8 yearold drive I don't personally find it terribly abnormal. slow and annoying yes but if you aren't getting read errors, and you are replacing it anyway I wouldn't worry. I wouldn't trust an 8 yearold harddrive (or any single harddrive for that matter) with anything irreplaceable.

i think the normal hard drive temp limit is 60 and case ventalation will affect it. you can always pull the side and point a fan at it to see if its the problem. how many files were in those 90.9 gigs is the real question? small files = lots of seek time and bouncing around. the folder size doesn't really matter.

It still sounds like you'd be better off just cloning it. there are also some harddrive read/write tools you can download and run if you want to compare the speed of the old and new drive.

hdtune is one. has a free version. and a trial version.

www.hdtune.com/download.html

I can't think of any others at the moment since I dont usually bother with them but I am sure there are more.

Checking it out right now
everything passes and im getting a spike of 33 mb/s of reading rate and a high of 51
gonna test for write

 

[vegettonox]

Contrary to what you may think steam has a massive amount of files in it, the steam folder contains all the game installations and in general your looking at several hundred if not thousands of files a game. I took a quick look at my own and looked at the farcry folder, farcry has over 3500 files in its installed folder.

 

[Ferinthul]

also what games are slow to load? Harddrives have an effect, but I see you only have 2 gigs of ram. I think you'd find more would help. 4 gig and 8 gig kits are dirt cheap now too, and with 8 you can probabaly turn off the page file completely

Sorry i have 4 gigs of ram, updating the OP.

L4d2, team fortress and such

my cpu also goes crazy so i thought the cpu was working harder cause the hdd's write speed was low.

Im not so sure anymore now.

 

[Ferinthul]

Contrary to what you may think steam has a massive amount of files in it, the steam folder contains all the game installations and in general your looking at several hundred if not thousands of files a game. I took a quick look at my own and looked at the farcry folder, farcry has over 3500 files in its installed folder.

Should i try running my steam games from another hdd and leave this one realtively empty?
If this hdd is really full would it be slower?

ty for the help by the way

 

[unksol]

Contrary to what you may think steam has a massive amount of files in it, the steam folder contains all the game installations and in general your looking at several hundred if not thousands of files a game. I took a quick look at my own and looked at the farcry folder, farcry has over 3500 files in its installed folder.

exactly. I am on my phone and couldn't recall if the did any better than a normal install, but I knew it had to be quite high so thanks for an example.

on a completely off topic point your CPU is a good overclocker in addition to the memory thing if your ever looking for some overall performance boosts. wont really help with file transfers though lol

 

[Ferinthul]

exactly. I am on my phone and couldn't recall if the did any better than a normal install, but I knew it had to be quite high so thanks for an example.

on a completely off topic point your CPU is a good overclocker in addition to the memory thing if your ever looking for some overall performance boosts. wont really help with file transfers though lol

Well i read its an easy 4.0ghz clocker, and i have no idea how to overclock. But i might learn how to do it later if i see some good cooling on sale.

 

[Ferinthul]

Could my hdd be bottlenecking my cpu?

 

[unksol]

Should i try running my steam games from another hdd and leave this one realtively empty?
If this hdd is really full would it be slower?

ty for the help by the way

In general you want the OS and games on your fastest drive as those files will be loaded a lot, and are small. I would say the new drive since the other is quite old.

you could use the old drive for backups of important stuff (it is pretty old but they probably wont both die at once), or if you have space issues for large files like movies, dvd images, etc which will still load relatively quickly since they are sequential reads, or things that you don't use/look at very often, say a steam game/backup you haven't played for a year, but might want to later. if the drive dies you can always redownload it. if its something IMPORTANT like your pictures for the last 10 years, or tax documents etc def burn a DVD and throw it in a lock box especially since the drive is so old.

 

[Ferinthul]

Best answer selected by Ferinthul.

 

[Ferinthul]

In general you want the OS and games on your fastest drive as those files will be loaded a lot, and are small. I would say the new drive since the other is quite old.

you could use the old drive for backups of important stuff (it is pretty old but they probably wont both die at once), or if you have space issues for large files like movies, dvd images, etc which will still load relatively quickly since they are sequential reads, or things that you don't use/look at very often, say a steam game/backup you haven't played for a year, but might want to later. if the drive dies you can always redownload it. if its something IMPORTANT like your pictures for the last 10 years, or tax documents etc def burn a DVD and throw it in a lock box especially since the drive is so old.

Ill try it out!

Thanks!, gonnado a clean install tomorrow then!

 

[unksol]

Could my hdd be bottlenecking my cpu?

it can cause slow load times, windows startups etc. that's why some people like SSDs. I wouldn't really consider it a bottleneck... its not going to directly affect your CPU unless you're running out of ram and using the page file. An SSD will get through program starts and level loads much faster, but once the information is loaded to memory that's where the CPU is working from. so after the load there's not a real difference between a faster and slower drive. till you need to load something else. I hear WoW has lots of loads so faster drives get you through them faster, same loading a map in BF3 etc etc.

hope that makes sense.

 

[Ferinthul]

it can cause slow load times, windows startups etc. that's why some people like SSDs. I wouldn't really consider it a bottleneck... its not going to directly affect your CPU unless you're running out of ram and using the page file. An SSD will get through program starts and level loads much faster, but once the information is loaded to memory that's where the CPU is working from. so after the load there's not a real difference between a faster and slower drive. till you need to load something else. I hear WoW has lots of loads so faster drives get you through them faster, same loading a map in BF3 etc etc.

hope that makes sense.

Makes a lot of sense actually. Ill keep that in mind.

 

[unksol]

Ill try it out!

Thanks!, gonnado a clean install tomorrow then!

you probably know this, but just to be safe don't forget that most steam save games are in your my documents or user folder somewhere. hate to have you move the steam folder thinking they were there, then wipe the old drive or something and not have them.