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I'm running Win 11Pro on a Dell Latitude laptop with 64GB of memory and 1TB hard drive. I've been trying to copy my .mp3 files to a 1TB USB drive. There are about 140GB worth of files. I started copying by genre, and the process kept stalling. Even breaking it down further by artist was extremely slow. I tried installing Fast Copy and Tera Copy, and both of those encounter similar problems. I disabled my antivirus program which helped a little, but I'm wondering if there is something I can tweak in Windows to enable faster copying. (I also tried xcopy and robocopy at both the command prompt and Power Shell, and could not get the commands right.)
Well, a new USB 3.0 drive of sufficient size (256 GB) solved the problem. The entire archive of music, copied in genre increments, took about 8 hours to copy using Tera Copy. For my own peace of mind I'll continue to try to figure out ropbocopy (using a newer 3.0 drive). I hate to be stymied by a computer problem! Thanks for trying to help.
You did not specify a folder on the D drive to copy the files to, for example the command should be.
robocopy "C:\MyMusic\Jazz" "D:\Jazz" /E
I'm throwing in the towel on this drive, as I think it's failing. I'm expecting a new one tomorrow, and we'll see if that makes a difference. Thanks!
Okay, I understand, I hope that resolves the problem for you.
I'm attaching a .jpg of the error I get when attempting to use robocopy. What am I doing wrong? robocopy.jpg
Sorry, I was offline.
The RoboCopy command is this one, if you just want to copy the data to the other drive
(I assume the other drive letter is D, you may need to change that).
(You also need to set the correct source and destination folder names).
robocopy "C:\SourceFolder" "D:\DestinationFolder" /E
When I open Command Prompt I'm in the system32 directory. Should I then change directory to just C:?
No there is no need to change the directory, if you see C:\Windows\System32 at the command prompt that just indicates you are in Administrator mode.
It is the source and destination folders in the RoboCopy command you need to change.
I can certainly try a different USB port. I've mostly tried copying within File Explorer. Tera Copy is only a slight improvement. Since installing Tera Copy I'm offered a choice of either Explorer or Tera Copy when copying files.
This is what the archive My Music on C: looks like: Music archive.jpg
This is what the Properties of My Music\ Jazz (the largest folder in the archive) looks like: Jazz.jpg
In searching on-line I saw that with Windows the copy function begins fast, but slows down when the cache is filled.
I'm trying to copy from C:\My Music to D:\Blues or Jazz, or Rock, etc. Can you give me the correct xcopy or robocopy command? I think that might bypass the cache limitation.
I am glad the new drive has resolved the problem for you.
