Well I just finished to transfer 2.539 files (103 GB) between 2 ATA 
drives using a simple copy and paste with an an average transfer rate of 
22.2 MB/sec. . BTW I'm using Vista.

I never got this transfer rate on XP. As Dario said getting lower 
transfer rates is an OS problem.

Later I'm installing a brand new SATA-II HD which has a transfer rate of 
3 Gbit/s and I'll do a 250GB copy to the new HD (ATA -> SATAII) using 
Vista too. I'll publish my copy performance FYI.

Regards

Hans Ruopp

Hector Martin wrote:
> Dario Greggio wrote:
>   
>> Russell McMahon wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> What sort of data transfer rate would people expect?
>>>       
>> I'd say the 150MBit/s should be somewhat guaranteed with that hardware, 
>> so it would make some 15MByet/sec.
>> The ATA133 was working good enough. Basic SATA are close to that.
>>     
>
> SATA is 1.2Gbit/s or around 150MB/s (twice that for SATA-300, which most 
> newer drives and motherboards handle). However, that rate is impossible 
> to achieve (unless you're reading cached data), since the actual hard 
> drive platters are *much* slower.
>
> On my box (Athlon64 3000+), using Hitachi 80GB drives on a SATA-150 
> motherboard, I get 30MB/s raw read speed. Factoring in filesystem 
> overhead, it's probably closer to 25MB/s. If you copy the raw partition 
> using DD, you'll get the full 30MB/s.
>
> 2-3MB/s is much too slow. Check your DMA status - Windows sometimes 
> randomly decides to disable DMA on a hard drive, and the only way to 
> reenable it is to screw around with the registry. I'd try a Linux 
> Live-CD. Use hdparm -t /dev/sda (substitute in whatever your HDD device 
> name is) to get a benchmark on read speed. If it's low, you probably 
> have a hardware limitation. If it's high, then windows is screwing you over.
>
>   
-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist