You said you were using XXCOPY 'in a DOS Box'.
All I/O in a DOS box is virtualized, so the context switching is killing you.

http://www.acronis.com/ has some decent tools for copying and resizing drives,
with free demo downloads good for 30 days.

R

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.
> 
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