I7 920 - Not Running that fast at all?

Hey, im just throwing this out there as i could use all the tech support to get this computer running at lightning speed. Here is the situation, i have asked on intel forums to no prevail and i know that this website constantly produces good answers:

This is my post on intel:

I am wondering, in regards to the new i7 920 chip i bought of intel, what sort of file copy speeds i should be getting? At the moment it is taking me approx 5 min to copy 5G of files from one drive to the other. I have installed all the necessary drivers and my device manager is recognising all the 8 cores. I have heard multiple reports of people with similar configurations of these file transfers taking only matter of seconds, can you please give me some advice and what i can do to begin getting these speeds?

Thanks!

Computer Specs:

Chipset: i7 920

Motherboard: Asus Rampage II Extreme

Ram: 3x 2gb 1600Mhz Corsair DDR3

HDD: 2 x Seagate 7200RPM 32mb Cache Sata Drives

Power Supply: Antec 650W True Power

Video Card: Saphire 4870 512mb

Case: HAF 922.


Operating System: Vista 64bit Ultimate.

Then how come others with i7 have reported much faster file copy speeds which take close to no time at all for large files. I have seen it happen aswell with no different hard drive speeds to my own.

Could you first describe what types of files composed this "5 gb" chunk, and whether you can reproduce this 5 min length of time? Also, when you move/copy files, there should be a "more informations" arrow, could you click that and report to us what the average speed is in MB/s?

Same here. Due to the way I have caching set up on my RAID volume, anything up to about 2GB is absolutely instant (the progress bar doesn't even have time to really appear), and above that, it runs around 100-200MB/s typically.

Computer technician's answer:
Yes, the CPU has almost nothing to do with it. It's probably less than 1%. The only time it is high is when it's dropped out of DMA to PIO mode or if Antivirus is scanning your files. I doubt your not in DMA mode but you can Google to find out.

Here's an example of a transfer between two hard drives. Assuming two newer hard drives with max read speeds of 100MB/sec and minimum speeds of 50MB/sec.

The fastest you can transfer a large file is 100MB/sec. That means 10 seconds for 1GB or 6GB per minute.

You can find programs such as HDTune to benchmark your drives. They'll also confirm your CPU usage which I'm guessing at roughly 1% for the i7 920 at maximum transfer rates.

The only reason for ridiculously low speeds is that your disks are being thrashed by antivirus software and/or indexing software. All of these applications will stop after a while.

"Instantaneous" 2GB file transfer? No.

Even if you had a crazy setup with 4 velociraptors in which you had two different RAID0 configurations your maximum transfer rates would be roughly 240MB/second maximum (probably a little lower). In this crazy setup you can transfer 1GB in roughly 4 seconds or 15GB per minute.

5GB in 5 minutes?

That is too slow. Without more information I can't help except to say run HDTune and see if the maximum read speed looks about the same as the specs say.

Some people have had strange glitches such as low speeds solved by going into the Device Manager and removing either the hard drive or the controller then rebooting. When Windows recognized the device or PATA/SATA controllder it installs the correct drivers or settings. You do not need to do this if HDTune shows the proper speeds.

Lots of small(ish) files then. That would be why it's taking a while. It's not to do with performance of your i7, or your HDDs (compared to other HDDs). It's just the nature of copying small files.

grab a ssd, best to get some nices ones like the intel ones, or the newest OCZ/G skill/ whichever company that does not use the crappy older JMicron controllers

That graph shows nothing. They had a problem with horrible write access time (>100ms, compared to 15ms for a normal hard drive, 7ms for my velociraptor array, and <1ms for a good SSD, such as the Intel), while all you are showing is the read speed and access time.

Do the raptors feel faster to you than the SSD?

Just a point to note - someone above unequivocally reccomended RAID 0 - while it might be the best structure for application / OS, I certianly wouldnt reccomend it for storing music, media or documents - 1) because there is no performance need - even if you do intensive editing - have your active workspace on RAID 0 but archive somewhere else. 2) If a drive fails its bye-bye data.

Just transferred some large files:

I didn't realize how much the speeds dropped. I transferred 100GB of data from a 1TB drive to another 1TB drive (both SATA).

Test 1, Pictures: 12MB/second

Test 2, Single large file: 53MB/second

So it looks like the eSATA Expresscard I bought for my dad was a waste of money. I bought it for him to transfer his pictures. It looks like basic USB hard drives are just fine for most people.

Chock up another reason for SSD's when they get cheap enough.