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
    2024-02-14T14:54:58+00:00

    Same here. Any file operations are tortuously slow on an NvMe.

    Moving files from one partition to another - 294MB is showing as 1 hour and 25 minutes.

    The same 294MB from one nvme to another is ‘about an hour’.

    Everything was fine until I recently had to do an in-place repair of Windows due to (the latest) Windows Update fiasco. I went from 22H2 to 23H2 and the slow file operations has been reintroduced!

    Good old Microsoft ! No matter how fast hardware becomes, the OS will always bring things to a crashing halt.

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  2. Les Ferch 10,361 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2023-12-24T04:14:37+00:00

    The speeds should be much, much higher regardless of what software you're using. Don't waste your time trying different programs. There's something going on that's killing the transfer speed. Encryption and virus checking are two big factors in slowing down copying. Both of those could still be in play in Safe Mode. Are the drives internal? If one or more drives are connected via USB, then there's a chance of a USB issue. More details are needed. You may want to open a discussion at elevenforum.com. It's a good place for troubleshooting issues like this.

    Update: I had exactly the same problem today when I attempted to copy files to and from an external SSD drive on a new computer that only has USB-C ports. I used a USB-A to USB-C adapter to plug in the drive. Transfer rates were ridiculously slow (like 3MB/s). I replaced the cable with a direct USB-C cable (a very short cable made for that drive) and then I got 1.5GB/s read and 680MB/s write. Maybe something similar is happening to you. The cable has to be correct to support high speed date transfers.

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  3. Anonymous
    2023-12-23T00:09:44+00:00

    Don't use Windows (File Explorer): is horribly slow on small files transfer in particular... and MS doesn't seem to care.

    Try tools like DSyncronize

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  4. Anonymous
    2023-12-07T13:25:26+00:00

    You shouldnt have to use robocopy. I have been having this issue since windows 10. copying from local to NAS drives

    All 2TB and 4TB SSDs

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  5. Anonymous
    2023-11-10T13:37:14+00:00

    Thanks for the suggestions.

    I have gone the Robocopy route. And while it is still very slow, I can actually see what the progress is in terms what's being copied across.

    Thanks again

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