How Do I Maintain Steady Copy Speed in Win 8.1?

PlatypusKnight

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As soon as I post this I'm going to ensure that my system specs are correct and posted.

I did three copy operations. From an external drive connected via USB 3.0 to a discrete partition of a single drive. The drive being copied to has 138 GB free of 600. The external drive has 123 GB free of 500. Both win defrag and a two third party defrag utils report that the external drive has less than 1% fragmentation while the drive being copied to has more than 50% fragmentation according to one of the third party defraggers but Window says fragmentation is 3% while the other third party defragger reports 6%.

I will run a defrag and see whether that resolves these issues.


  1. 4.18 GB - 24 files
  2. 5.8 GB- 21 files
  3. 5.3 GB - 23 files

Each of them started at 41.5 MB/S
After about 15-20 seconds copy speed plummeted to 11.1 MB/s and fluctuated between 11.1 and single digit MB/s.

Why is this?

How can I curb or curtail this behavior in future?

This may be relevant, but I have noted that pausing the copy operation mid way and unpausing will return the copy operation to the original faster speeds as long as copying is paused for more than 10 secs give or take.

Is there some cache somewhere that I should enlarge?

Thanks in advance for helping me thresh this out.
No pun intended. :cool:
 
See whether enabling Write Caching will help - in device properties of the device manager.

2015-06-03_1645.png
 
Thanks for the information guys. And thanks for helping me out with this.

Here's the options for the drives relevant here.

Hard drive:

Hard Properties.png

Removable drive:
Removable properties.png


So I did some more testing last night. I notice that it doesn't matter where the copy operation takes place. It doesn't matter if its from removable to hard drive or from hard drive to hard drive. The slowdown occurs.

So there has to be some sort of cache in there someplace. Where is it, and how do I enlarge it?
I don't know if it's caching this material in ram. I really wouldn't mind if it used 75% of my RAM for copies. I almost always have about 3.5 GB of ram sitting around not being used anyhow.

Would copying be faster if it used RAM?
 
Remote Differential Compression?

There is a Windows feature called Remote Differential Compression. I did a test some years back with my (previous) Vista system with and without RDC. I found that *without* RDC, my file transfer times were about 1/3 faster. I have also read articles that says RDC makes no such difference. For better or worse, with my 8.1 I have RDC turned off. I only mention this in case you run out of other ideas. Perfectly willing to be talked into reversing my choice. :-)
 
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