Copying files between drives all of a sudden really slow. [Windows 7]

jackperry

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Dec 9, 2014
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Hi all,

So... I have three hard drives. One SSD which is my OS drive, one which I install games on and also download tv shows to, and the last one which houses organized media for Plex (tv shows, movies, anime, etc). Normally transferring a download from the second drive to the Plex drive takes a few seconds, maybe five seconds max unless it's a big file size, those could take maybe 15-20.

However in the past few days, even small transfers (300MB) are taking minutes, even with TeraCopy. Larger files (1GB+) are taking 5-10 minutes. I've tried TeraCopy, regular Explorer, I've checked all of my drives using HDTune and CrystalDriveInfo and they all say healthy. Even generating thumbnails or even right-clicking to rename a video file is lagging.

I'm at a loss for what is going on. Any ideas? I'd really like to not have to get a new drive as backing the media up will take forever since it's so slow.
 
Worst case: The drive is dying. Use SMART tools to see if the drive is generating an excessive number of read/write errors. If it is, backup your data ASAP and replace the drive.

Best case: Are you using bittorrent to download TV shows? Fire up a disk defragment tool and analyze the drive. I'm betting it's horribly fragmented. Most bittorrent apps have an option to allocate the entire file when you begin downloading, but it's disabled by default.

Without this option, each piece of the file you download gets written to the first available spot on the disk. By the time the entire file is downloaded, it's fragmented into 3000 or so pieces. This means the read/write heads have to move all over to read the file, pausing with each move. If the file weren't fragmented it could read it as one sequential transfer at 100+ MB/s. But fragmented like this, reads will slow down to a few MB/sec.

First step is to defragment the drive. Depending on the size and free space, it may be better to copy the game files to another drive (I assume they were written to the drive while it was still relatively unfragmented, so they should copy fairly quickly). Then delete them to clear up space for the defrag tool to work. Do the same with any downloaded shows which have finished - the more space you can clear up, the faster the defrag will go. Optionally, you can just delete them if you think it'll be faster to re-download them. A delete only changes a single byte at the beginning of the file, so is really quick.

Once the disk is clear of everything but files you can't remove (in-progress downloads), run the defragger. Note that this means you have to exit the bittorrent app, otherwise it will prevent the defragger from moving files it's currently downloading. When the defrag is completed, you can copy the game files and whatever else back to the drive. (I'd actually recommend putting the game files elsewhere - the drive you use for torrent downloads should only be used for torrent downloads precisely to localize problems like this to only bittorrent.)

Last is the most important step. Find the option in your bittorrent program to pre-allocate the file when you begin downloading, and enable it. The only time this should not be enabled is if you're downloading to a SSD (which doesn't suffer a slowdown from file fragmentation).
 

jackperry

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Dec 9, 2014
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Solandri,

Thank you so much for the detailed response. You're right, I am using bittorrent and my games do not seem to suffer this problem. To give some insight, the disk I torrent on also houses my games and old backups that don't really get touched. That said, it is a 2TB (1.81) drive, with 1.01 used, and 825GB free. Is that too much to run defrag as it is? I should still move everything off of it?

What about the fact that even AFTER the files are transferred to my Plex drive, renaming and thumbnail generation is much slower than it was before as well. Is this possibly a side effect of the nature of the drive? It didn't seem this slow before, it seems to have started when the slow copying started.
 

If it's only half full, it should be ok to just skip straight to the defrag. WIth 1 TB of data, expect it to take a while. Run it overnight.

What about the fact that even AFTER the files are transferred to my Plex drive, renaming and thumbnail generation is much slower than it was before as well. Is this possibly a side effect of the nature of the drive? It didn't seem this slow before, it seems to have started when the slow copying started.
Can't think of a reason why that would be related to the torrent drive slowing down. Normally thumbnails are stored in a hidden file in the same folder as the file. Filenames are stored on the HDD (both your Plex drive in this case). So it should be completely unrelated to your slow drive.

You can try having the defragger analyze your Plex drive as well. Maybe you've got excessive fragmentation there as well.

You can also check if your thumbnail cache has been disabled. Standard warnings about being careful before messing with the registry apply (make a manual restore checkpoint if you're unsure).
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/10794-thumbnail-cache-enable-disable.html

If you've got a huge number of media files in one folder, that can slow things down as well. Try sorting things into subfolders, if Plex allows. It's also possible Windows is deleting your thumbnail cache too frequently. This is sort of a give-and-take situation. More frequent deletions and rebuilds means more accuracy (fewer files without thumbnails). But it also means longer to rebuild the thumbnails in a folder. Separating out the files into different folders will help prevent this.

It's also possible to disable Windows' penchant for deleting the thumbnail file. I do not know what the side effects of doing this would be though.
http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/stopprevent-windows-7-from-deleting-thumbnail-cache/