Windows 11, copying files between hard drives painfully slow

Anonymous
2023-11-07T14:37:48+00:00

Has anyone else experiencing extremely long times for copying one hard drive to another?

I'm trying to copy all the files from a standard 3.5" hard drive to an SSD.

It's almost 1TB of data but the speeds continuosly drop to less than 1MB/s when in safe mode, as running the PC in it's normal mode stalled the copying process with it showing 0KB/s.

I am on the latest version of Windows and with the newest updates with the apparent bug fix.

I am on day 3 of copying these files.

I have tried all the "fixes" that show up on Google and both hard drives have "full control" by myself/all users.

Hoping someone can help.

Windows for home | Windows 11 | Files, folders, and storage

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  1. Anonymous
    2024-11-07T22:07:53+00:00

    I have the same problem. Bought a new hi-spec Asus Windows 11 machine and copying files from external HD to SSD. Windows 10 on the old machi does it in a blink of the eye. new machine is slower than molasses in January. The difference is gargantuan. FastCopy no better Sync Back estimates 2 days g hours! How can Microsoft continue to ignore this problem???

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  2. Anonymous
    2024-11-04T19:01:13+00:00

    Can't believe no one in windows acknowledged this...
    More than a year and the problem persists.

    Did anyone find a fix? Too many things sorted to roll back to windows 10 sadly

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  3. Anonymous
    2024-10-27T01:29:42+00:00

    I had the same difficulty, being unable to do the most basic back up because a 30 MB file would take 10 minutes to transfer to an external drive.

    Followed someone's advice here and downloaded FastCopy, it works perfectly fine! The transfer is stable at 3.60 MB/s and never plummels down at 0. But you shouldn't have to use a 3rd party software for the most basic copy/paste function.

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  4. Anonymous
    2024-10-26T21:38:25+00:00

    Same problem here; mainly with external USB HDD drives. New USB-3 drives with the original drive-specific USB-cable. Only happens on Windows 11; not on Windows 10 (using the same drives). And not only 2.5" and 3.5" HDDs, but also SSDs are affected.

    Never found a solution, but there are 2 'reasonable' work-arounds on Windows 11:

    1. When it 'gets slow' (i.e. the speed drops/falls significantly, say < 1 MB/s), pause the copy/move statement, wait like 10s and unpause it; that will usually take it back to the regular copy-speed for small files for a while. You possibly need to repeat this step after a certain <random> period. If it doesn't help, try waiter a bit longer, perhaps 15s.
    2. Use Total Commander for the file-copies/moves to external drives. Like some of the other tools already mentioned in comments; it uses it's own 'methods' and is not affected (unless you explicitly change these settings) by the weird Win11 Explorer behaviour.

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  5. Anonymous
    2024-10-23T06:35:01+00:00

    Guys, do like I did, I upgraded to Windows 10 and all the problems went away.

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