What is the normal transfer rate between SATA drives?

mvietori

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Jun 5, 2008
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Hello Everyone

Just a quick question that I am curious about, hopefully someone can give me an approximation. I currently have two identical 320GB western digital drives @ 7200 RPM both on standard SATA connectors. I'm using Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit. When I transfer large files between the two drives I usually hit between 32 MB/sec up to 50 MB/sec. I'm wondering what would be a normal, acceptable transfer rate in this scenario? Am I within that range, or should I be seeing much higher transfer rates? What is the "norm"?
 

4745454b

Titan
Moderator
Probably correct. Drives tend to transfer a bit faster then this (~70MB), but those tend to be blank drives. I'm assuming you have stuff on these drives, so you might be transferring in areas that have a lower transfer speed. As long as you get a lot of 50MB and not so much 30MB, I don't think I would worry.

Try defragging both drive and see what happens.
 

mvietori

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Jun 5, 2008
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Both drives have quite a bit of stuff on them (around 200GB worth), and yeah I can't remember the last time I defragged either of them. More often than not it's at the 30-35 MB/Sec range; I guess when I hit a relatively clean sector it goes up to 50-ish but that's not too often. I will defrag them and see what I get.