What's a normal copy speed between two internal hard disks?

I have a PC with two internal SATA 7,200 RPM harddisks: one is a 1 TB Western Digital, and the other is 750 GB. I'm copying data between them, but it seems to be very slow: for example, to copy 140 GB takes about 5 hours.

Does this seem reasonable?

Solution 1:

In your comment on sblair's answer you stated that:

however I believe that it is being zipped on the fly, then unzipped on the other disk.

This is the most likely cause as to your low speed.

Solution 2:

Copying a single large file between two WD Caviar drives amounts to 85 MB/s for me. Both drives are connected to the SATA ports provided by an NVidia nForce chipset motherboard.

If the source drive is badly fragmented (typical if it is nearly full and has been used for a long time), this can slow down reading speed.

If the data you're copying consists of a large number of small files, this can drastically reduce performance. The slowest part normally is the creation of files on the target disk because each time a file is created, the OS circumvents caching to ensure the updated file system tables are written to disk.

For backup purposes, it helps to zip or rar with no compression from one hard drive to the other. Making a backup of 10 GB of small files (to an SSD with 0.1 ms seek time even) takes me 1 hour 30 minutes of copying. Using RAR with 'store' compression, the same backup takes 2 minutes.

Solution 3:

Perhaps a badly fragmented disk, a failing disk, encrypted disk (or folders), or compressed folders?

Solution 4:

That's an average of about 8MB/s, which is much slower than I'd expect. Was it mostly lots of small files? Are they both SATA 3.0GB/s drives? Was another program running, such as a virus scanner? Did you copy the files in one go (one single copy and paste command), or did you have several copy operations running at the same time? These are some of the obvious questions anyway...