How to copy files between two hard drives faster?

[Chitamacha]

Hi,
When I try to copy files from one hard drive to other then it copies the files at about 20 MB per second but when I copy the same file from one partition to other partition which are of the same drive then it copies the files at about more than double speed of it. This is very slow speed because SATA has the theoretical speed of 3 Gb/s. Provide suggestion that how can I increase this speed?

[Enriqueta]

Are both the hard drive you are using is of SATA? because that speed you have mentioned is the speed between SATA hard drives. If you are transferring a large amount of data which is in the form of several files from one hard drive to another then it will take more time then transferring few files of large size. That is normal and it will give around the same speed on other drives.

[Ernesto4]

As you told about 3GB/s Sata speed then I must tell you that transfer speed is all about your particular drives R/W speed. You can download Teracopy software from internet and install it and I am sure that will increase the transfer speed to some extent. Speed may differ to transfer to a different hard drive and to transfer to other partition of the same hard drive because of fragmentation, partition size, file size etc. For the fast system Hard drives are always bottleneck.

[Chitamacha]

Hey, I have downloaded the Teracopy software and installed it in my computer but that does not helped me much. It increases the speed but that is similar to nothing. By the way thanks for your suggestion. Can you give me any other idea to do this. I heard that I can increase the speed using DOS command robocopy and it is a good software. But I don't know how to use it. Will this work for me?

[Deep123]

Yes, it will be better for you to use Robocopy or xcopy and it will give you faster transfer rate that those of shells but will not increase to a very large extend. If you are getting the speed of 20MB per second then I think you have a very poor partitioned drive. Many venders will quote transfer speeds from the disk *to or from cache*, but it will not going to make much difference. It will take more time if there are many small file to be copied.

You should run benchmarking utility against the drive like SiSoft Sandra, HDTach.

[mesterio]

You should keep in mind that USB is a "bursty" bus and it is not intended for sustained file transfer. You can use firewire, if you want to external transfer speed to boost. Based on the type of memory inside all the USB keys has their own speed limit Therefore you need to know what is the maximum transfer speed of the USB you are using.

[pixelbob]

Please try to check if your motherboard supports the 3GB/s transfer rate.

[Lillebror]

I think Tracopy Software will be the best for you. Here are the feature that you will find in Teracopy.

• You can copy/move to favorite folder.
• You can select files with the same extension/same folder.
• You can also remove selected files from the copy queue.
• Tou can also get free updates and priority support.