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Okay so I'm a software engineer and I'm always trying to keep my hardware up to date because my biggest pet peeve is waiting for my system to do something.

So I have the following drives and mobo

  • 1TB Samsung 960 PRO NVMe
  • 2 TB Samsung 970 Plus
  • ROG STRIX z390-E

I just recently purchased that 970 and I'm trying to move 40GB of source code projects from the 960 to the 970. I just selected my source folder, hit ctrl + x, selected my new drive, hit ctrl + v.

Can someone explain this? Insanely slow speed

Still slow even after a while

Its 40GBs... direct hard drive to hard drive I'd expect this to take a few minutes at the most. All this hype and craze about "blazing fast read/write speeds", when do we get to call that false advertising? I would wager that I could plug in an old platter and it would be just as fast for this operation LOL.

But in seriousness, what do I check? Maybe I have BIOS settings that are wildly off? Defective board? To be honest, I've NEVER experienced a noticible speed increase from any hard drive tech upgrade. From platter to SSD to NVMe. It seems like my files copy same speed to day as they did 10 years go. What am I missing?

EDIT: Benchmark results: Benchmark

I mean, they look like it should be insanely fast right? Why isn't it this way in practice?

Joshua Sanders
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    Samsung has a tool that can benchmark both of those drives. Please provide the results of those benchmarks by editing your question. – Ramhound Jul 30 '20 at 22:43
  • Done! Results have been added – Joshua Sanders Jul 30 '20 at 23:00
  • Your 970 Evo is awfully warm that can effect the performance of an SSD significantly – Ramhound Jul 30 '20 at 23:29
  • I was wondering about that too. I wonder why its so warm... – Joshua Sanders Jul 30 '20 at 23:32
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    A NVMe or SSD is not a *"hard drive"*. Maybe the term you are looking for is "mass-storage device"? *"Its 40GBs"* -- It's not just the amount of data, but also the number of files and directories. Copying many files and directories involves a multitude of I/O operations. See https://superuser.com/questions/344534/why-does-copying-the-same-amount-of-data-take-longer-if-spread-across-many-separ/344860#344860 And that explanation does not include the *additional* overhead of a journaling filesystem. – sawdust Jul 30 '20 at 23:36
  • are there a lot of really small files that are being copied? – Kalamalka Kid Jul 31 '20 at 01:18

2 Answers2

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Small files (like source files) will often present very poor filesystem performance, which is especially noticable when you have many of them to shift...

Regarding the lumpy graph, I'd suggest that the higher transfer speeds (peaks) represent files that are significantly larger, and are thus able to achieve a much higher transfer rate as they can be handled that much more efficiently.

enter image description here

What is the average file size you're dealing with? From your screenshots, I calculate about 110-150KiB (12GiB / 116k, or 39.1GiB / 280k)... however, given my expectations surrounding the larger files, this could be more than an order of magnitude off if you exclude the large files from the calculation.

Your benchmark figures look quite reasonable, and I'd suggest that these speeds are still very slow, regardless of my theorising above.

What else was your system doing at the time?

Attie
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  • Interesting, yeah I suppose that makes sense. I'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks its exceptionally slow though. My system wasn't doing anything else. I had just booted, and it was the only thing I was trying to do – Joshua Sanders Jul 30 '20 at 23:20
  • Can you share additional information about the file sizes in your question? – Attie Jul 30 '20 at 23:57
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    Sure! Mostly extremely tiny. The vast majority of files were < 1MB and probably closer to 10 - 200KB. They were mostly code files afterall. Some files were large, up to 200MB asset files. – Joshua Sanders Aug 01 '20 at 00:11
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Just to mention: robocopy is much faster than "regular" windows copying. And copying a lot of small files will also be slower than copying large files. If you're not comfortable using command line interface to copy files with robocopy, I've created a tool which lets you robocopy folders from a right-click menu (and includes much more tools for admins): RCWM.

Regarding your copy speeds always being about the same, even when swapping hardware, makes me think it might be a Windows issue - what's your Windows version? It could also be that some program, or a Windows component, is using your C: disk a lot - what's the disk usage as reported by Task Manager? It might be time to format your disk and install a new, clean Windows version.

It could also be a hardware issue (motherboard, cables?), but I doubt it since the benchmark looks okay ...

GChuf
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