External HD speeds

[Burpee]

I just tried copying files from my F drive to my I drive and even trying to open the I to explore it bogged my computer down to a standstill. I finally got it to start copying files and it took 20 minutes and hardly made a dent. Simple text files took way too long. I had to stop it.

I had the same slowness back when I had my G drive I lost but even it was faster than this one. Any clue as to why it's so slow? I tried turning off my Antivirus read and writing checking but that wasn't option. I set it to check when reading only as it had been set to reading and writing checking. I figured that had to be faster than doing both.

Maybe my computer is just too old and slow? I do know that the speed of the USB port makes a difference but I don't know how to check them.

Intel Pentium 4 cpu 3.00mhz
2046MB ram (there's no more slots for more)

[Soquili]

Nancy I would assume that your system is old enough to have only USB 1.0 ports, which are very slow compared to USB 2.0 or the newest USB 3.0 ports.

Most external drives require USB 2.0 speeds to work efficiently.

Is your system 300 MHz? 3.00MHz or 3MHz seems slow for a Pentium 4. In either case that is slow expecially if multiple hard drives are connected. Each hard drive requires a portion of your RAM for read and write buffers and each drive is constantly requesting attention from your CPU. Copy operations require even more RAM which may not be available so more read and write operations are being done using smaller segments of each file being copied.

[steve.ledger]

Nancy your older PC will be using USB 1.1 which has a transfer speed of just 12 Mbit/s.
USB 2 introduced later has a transfer speed of 480 Mbit/s.

[Soquili]

Identical time stamps on Steve's and my post. What is that old saying about two minds working alike?

[Burpee]

Lol, thank you boys

Bill, that's 3.00mhz...at least that's what it says in dxdiag. I have hyper-threading if that makes a difference.

I feel like I'm beating my head on the wall. I definitely need a new system. Egads, I'm in the midievil era, lol.

[steve.ledger]

Bill, that's 3.00mhz...

Nancy that would be 3.00GHz.
At 3mhz your PC would not run at all, it would drag itself along by it's fingernails

Press the WinKey+PAUSE key together, this will show you what processer is fitted.

[Burpee]

You are absolutely correct Steve, it's 3.00Ghz. I mistyped, lol. I never noticed or used the 'pause' key before. Something new everyday.

My F drive is quite fast. This new Toshiba is the slow one. I worry that it's not working correctly...but then I worry about alot of thing

[steve.ledger]

The external drive will be slower to write to than the internal drive for the reasons mentioned above.
The biggest bottle neck is the slow USB 1.1 transfer rates.
Don't worry - be happy

PS: TeraCopy can help copy and moves files faster than Windows Explorer. I used it on my older XP system for a few years

[Burpee]

It's just that my F drive IS an external drive and the transfer rate is pretty good. I'm thinking because it's on the line first (F comes before I) that it gets priority. That's my story and I'm stickin' to it

I made the mistake of not taking my little flash drive out of the computer before attaching it so the flash drive is G. One thing about the Toshiba is it's so darn pretty!!!! All black and shiny and cool looking.

[steve.ledger]

'pologies - I'm confused