Slow data copying between 2 SATA 5600rpm hard drives

[medwynd]

I am fixing up my WHS and copying all my data off the pooled drives. I am copying from a Samsung F3EG HD203WI to a Hitachi 5k3000 hooked up to a Vista x64 machine.

I am averaging about 20MB/sec only. Sometimes my transfer rate will drop to almost nothing, like 100k/sec then go back up and stabilize some.

I've ran diagnostics on both drives and there doesn't seem to be a problem physically with the drives.

Is this just something I should expect from trying to move large volumes, 1.5TB+, from one 5600 rpm drive to another? Is the copying dialog of Windows just plain wrong in its estimates? It thinks it's going to take 10 hours and increasing to copy 161GB of data.

HDTune shows these stats for the drives:
HD Tune: Hitachi HDS5C3020ALA Benchmark
Transfer Rate Minimum : 57.0 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 140.6 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 99.3 MB/sec
Access Time : 15.6 ms
Burst Rate : 149.2 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 9.0%

HD Tune: SAMSUNG HD203WI Benchmark
Transfer Rate Minimum : 47.0 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 110.4 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 85.3 MB/sec
Access Time : 13.2 ms
Burst Rate : 144.9 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 6.3%

[gplasky]

If your have WHS functioning it is probably happening whenever demigrator on WHS kicks in. De migrator is kicking in and moving the files around. You should be able to turn off the demigrator service (disable it). You'll get a critical error notice in WHS but ignore it.

DriveMigratorOff.bat-Batch to turn off

@echo off
sc stop "DriveExtenderMigrator"
sc config "DriveExtenderMigrator" start= disabled
exit

DriveExtenderStop.bat-Batch to disable

REM Batchfile to stop the WHS Drive Extender Migrator Service and set it to Disabled
net stop DriveExtenderMigrator
sc.exe \\localhost config DriveExtenderMigrator start= disabled

DemigratorOn.bat-Batch to turn on

@echo off
sc config "DriveExtenderMigrator" start= demand
sc start "DriveExtenderMigrator"
exit

Gerry