Russell McMahon wrote: > I'm copying data from an almost full 320 GB Seagate SATA drive to a 320GB > WD SATA drive. WD is new. Seagate has been extensively used. Processor > is Pentium D (dual core) 2.8 GHz, 1 GB RAM. Both drives are NTFS. > Transfer is using XXCOPY in a DOS box, which is usually about as fast as > any other means. [...] Motherboard has 4 x SATA ports and there are 4 x > 320 GB drives on the system (including the above 2) plus an 80 GB IDE > drive. No other user activity is taking place. PC is LAN connected. Not > acting as a server or being accessed on the LAN. > > What sort of data transfer rate would people expect? Two standard IDE 7.2krpm disks with NTFS on a 350MHz PII, running Win2k without any special accelerating measures, I get typically ~20MB/s. What you should get depends mostly on the drives (rotation speed, number of surfaces) and on how fragmented the files are. For such transfers, the limiting factor is in most cases the data transfer on and off the disks; the rest of the system should be able to cope with that rate. See e.g. . > I'm getting something around 2.5 to 3 MB/second (won't know for sure > until finished). This seems far too slow. I agree. Gerhard -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist