External Hard Drive - Slow Data Tranfer Speed

[illastic1]

I bought a 300 gb external maxtor 6 L300R0 hard drive and installed it with no problems. But when I transfer data from my other hard drives onto it..it a takes ridiculously long time, like an hour to transfer 700 mb's of data. I noticed that the new drive runs on ntfs file system and my other drives run on fat32. Is the difference in file systems what is causing the slow transfer speed? If so what would be the simplest way to convert the drive from ntfs to fat32? And is it possible to do this without losing the data that i have on the drive?

If the difference in file systems is not what is causing the slow transfer speeds what could it be? And how would i go about fixing this problem?

I am using Windows XP SP2

Thanks

 

[micker377]

How is the drive connected? Is it USB, or FireWire? To really sort it out, you could try the drive by itself as a slave, or try a different "box" to mount it in. Of course, this might void the warranty! The type of file system shouldn't make any difference. My system has two internal hard drives (FAT), and the external is NTFS. A 16gig back-up takes about 12 minutes. This is about the same as a weekly backup to the internal drive (I alternate). Have you tried the drive on a different computer? I found very little difference between FireWire and USB 2. You do have USB 2? It is at least ten times faster than USB 1.

 

[illastic1]

The drive is connected through USB as I don't have firewire ports on my pc. My machine is quite old so i reckon its USB 1. I would try the drive inside the cpu as a slave but I dont really have any space or mount to put it on as I have two other hard drives and 2 cd/dvd burners, that was why I bought an external drive. I haven't had the chance to try the drive in someone elses PC.

Cheers

 

[jaxx75]

right click on "my computer" go to Properties -> device manager.

look for your USB controller, if it says 2 then it IS 2.0, if it says nothing, you have USB 1, 1.1.

USB 1.1 is as slow as a snail. Might try to get a PCI card that supports USB 2 or Firewire (if your external HDD supports it).

-Jackson

 

[illastic1]

It says nothing so it must be USB 1, 1.1. I still don't think it should be this slow though even with USB 1.

 

[wolluf]

No - even USB 1.1 should do up to 5GB per hour, so if its really taking an hour to do 700MB, something else as well (eg,
what you are copying on to it is currently stored on very fragmented filestore - retrieving all the parts of the fragmented files can take a lot longer than single. Of if there are many small files involved. As the source filestore is fat32, fragmentation has more impact than on ntfs - in my experience. The fact of copying from one filestore type to the other shouldn't impact).

You do really need a USB 2 interface to manage an external drive of that size - the PCI cards to support this are inexpensive.

 

[cdogg]

First of all, here's how you check to see if you have USB 2.0 (You're looking for the word "Enhanced" in Device Manager):

http://www.usbman.com/Guides/checking_for_usb_2.htm

If you're system didn't come with Windows XP and/or is more than 3 years old, there's a good chance it doesn't have it built in. As wolluf said, get yourself a PCI USB 2.0 card. You can find some good prices on

http://www.pricewatch.com

(look under the "Cards - Controller" section), but be sure to look out for generic cards as they tend to have more compatibility issues. Belkin, Adaptec, and NEC are decent ones to go with.



As for USB 1.1 speeds...

The interface has a max transfer rate of 1.5MB/s (12mbps) in one direction. There is some overhead involved, so you're probably getting somewhere between 1 and 1.25MB/s. If you do the math using the lower part of this range, it shouldn't take longer than 12 minutes to transfer 700MB.


I can assure you that the file system should have nothing to do with it. There might be other factors involved such as low system resources (you have a lot running in the background that you're not aware of), or perhaps there is a bad negotiation over USB and you're only getting about .20 MB/s transfer rates. Upgrading to USB 2.0 should help.

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884