Terrible hard drive copying speed? problem?

[mayan]

Hey I bought a new hard drive to replace an old 40gb seagate drive in my pc.

The seagate drive is just storage and i've usually copied files TO the drive but not often FROM it.
Today i realised that nomatter which destination drive I chose the copying speeds from the old drive were REAL slow and it made me think there was something wrong?

I downloaded HDTune to check out a quick benchmark and the results were strange.


I know the drive is old but then when i compared it to my western digital [equally old] drive you can tell theres something up.



I was just wondering if theres something I can do to try and fix this problem so that I can transfer all the data onto my new drive quickly. Because at those rates its going to take forever!

[DR]

Is it on the same SATA controller?

What OS?

How big are the files?

[mayan]

Hey their both on the same ribbon thing on IDE
and i've tried moving all sorts of different files
a 60mb folder seemed to go so slow i cancelled it in the end..
when i copy a single 4mb mp3 it took 25 seconds!

[peterb]

Assuming that you have got them set up correctly as master and slave, it could be that DMA isn't set up correctly (or disabled) which would significantly impair performance. That is usually a bios setting, but may also need tweaking in Windows (you didn't say which version - if it is indeed windows)

[mayan]

I think i've got it set up correctly, i will give that a check over though.
it's windows xp. How can i check/enable DMA ?

edit: seems like these were the dma settings for the ide controller hmm

[mayan]

i'm just guessing really but i think i found something that looks a little strange


check out the information for
SUPPORTED and ACTIVE on the bottom right of the screenshot.

[Craig321]

Yes, it may be that. Put it up to DMA 5 and it should speed up... although DMA 2 shouldn't be quite that slow, even PIO mode (1 below DMA1) is 3mb/s

[mayan]

managed to get it changed to DMA5 but theres no difference in the speed ouch
no idea what to do from here other than maybe just set it to transfer and hope it doesnt take TOO long ouch

[vaughan]

make sure you are using an 80 core ribbon cable for the drives, and performance will significantly increase if you have them on seperate cables.

the way IDE works it can only read from 1 at a time, so it's swapping between c & d constantly at high speed.. when on seperate cables then it can read both simultaneously.

also check in the bios and see if LBA mode is enabled..