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

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments

47 answers

Sort by: Most helpful
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. 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

    Was this answer helpful?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  2. 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.

    Was this answer helpful?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  3. 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.

    Was this answer helpful?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  4. Les Ferch 10,361 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2024-04-12T18:34:20+00:00

    HDD is SATA internal drive.

    SSD is M.2

    I wouldn't expect any performance issue in that case. I would start up in Safe Mode and test the speed. That may help determine next troubleshooting steps.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  5. Anonymous
    2024-04-12T18:25:22+00:00

    HDD is SATA internal drive.

    SSD is M.2

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments