Copying file on disk slows pc to a crawl.

[steven01]

I might not have the fastest computer but I have a intel 3.0ghz, 1 gig of ram, ASUS P5GPL-X Socket T and a 200gb Maxtor SATA drive system. This system should'nt be so slow when just doing a simple .rar file extraction or when copying a large file. It almost seems like processor speed doesn't matter. I bet if I even had one of those new intel Duo processors I would still have this problem. So what can I do about it? Is this a problem that everyone has? Thanks.
Here's a shot of my ide channels if it helps.

http://img241.imageshack.us/img241/4513/screenshotxu2.jpg

http://img46.imageshack.us/img46/3588/screenshot2db3.jpg

 

[almerac]

some things just take time. if you wanted to speed that up (and are dealing with relatively large files) you may want to consider getting another hard drive and RAID them. otherwise i would suggest some basic house cleaning like defragging and cleaning up your registry and background apps.
that and windows tends to need a good clean install every year or so.

 

[Mobius]

File Copy is a disk-heavy operation - and depending on how fragmented your HDD is, can take quite a while. If you are talking Gigs rather than Megs - then yeah - it'll take a while. Defragment the HDD in Computer Management.

As to RAR extractions - you obviously do not understand the compression/decompression algorythms at all. This is VERY CPU intensive, and depending on how heavily compressed the original file was, extracing RARs (especially the idiotic 500 x 1.4MB variety - which are flat out retarded. I swear Torrent makers are fucking morons.) can take quite a while.

Your time probably isn't worth more than $20 an hour, so I'd just keep that in mind while it takes 60 seconds to extract a movie that took 4 days to download.

In other words: keep your hat on. Relax. Enjoy.

P.S. RAID won't help you. STEER CLEAR OF RAID AT ALL COSTS!

 

[steven01]

I think I'm gonna have to get two Western Digital Raptor's and raid those. Yeah, I'll do that soon as I get a chance.

 

[almerac]

i havent run raid 0 in windows in awhile, linux has always been stable for me with it. raptors are nice hard drives. but the perpendicular ones are almost as fast and have large capacity.

 

[almerac]

i disagree. while copying small files obviously wont necessitate a RAID setup, no one can disagree (reasonably) that with large files (IE 500MB or so) that RAID significantly speeds up these copy or file transfer operations. the problem is people (possibly like yourself) expect raid to increase the general responsiveness of your computer. this it does not do. it may reduce seek times, a little bit, but what it does is it provides (theoretically) the ability to SUSTAIN twice the bandwidth of a single hard drive. in reality you do not often get linear scaling in speeds, this is most often the fault of the controller or the way you have it set up (IE software RAID). but once you graduate beyond the simple thinking of "oh i'm gonna get 2 raptors and raid them for fast level loads" you can see the use of raid. raid works better with MORE hard drives, something like a 4hdd raid 0 is nothing to spit at in speed, and maintainable throughput. especially with large files. and as you add more you will get insane levels of bandwidth, IE i had a HP workstation back in the day (was a PII 400) and it had a 4 scsi raid 1 setup, when i got it, with 4, 4.5 GB hard drives. i did not need the redundancy, so i simply made it a RAID 0 and reinstalled windows and whatnot. after such i had measurable burst rates of around 100MB/s and throughputs in the 60-80MB/s area, which even today is decent. granted these were 10,000RPM cheetahs. and it did wonders for my file transfer speeds.

 

[derekjr]

Has it always been this way? or did it start happening recently?

extracting a RAR is more CPU intensive than simply copying a file, so that would naturally be slower, but you say both are very slow

I don't know if they exist, but maybe there are specific SATA drivers for your motherboard/chipset that would improve performance (instead of the windows drivers)?

 

[MadHacker]

Getting a second harddrive would be a good idea.. but not raid...
unrar or copying from drive to drive will be much faster...
also you can keep backups of personal files on both drives and then not worry about 1 drive failing...

 

[steven01]

Well, I haven't defraged in a long time because I only have about 1 gig of space left so that might be my problem. I have Diskeeper but it says it can't defrag because of the low disk space. I really don't want to delete all my .avi movies and my games (their all legal by the way . And I don't want to have the burn all of them to dvd so I guess I have to wait untill I can add a third drive and movies files there.

 

[MadHacker]

Well, I haven't defraged in a long time because I only have about 1 gig of space left so that might be my problem. I have Diskeeper but it says it can't defrag because of the low disk space. I really don't want to delete all my .avi movies and my games (their all legal by the way . And I don't want to have the burn all of them to dvd so I guess I have to wait untill I can add a third drive and movies files there.

\
Hence the reason of your slow drive...
had you mentioned this in your first post. the solution would have be found immediately

 

[tcsdoc]

Get a faster computer.

 

[almerac]

yes that would have been usefull to know