I'm currently organizing my photo library by copying files from multiple backup sources. I have about 160GB of photos, which I initially copied from my laptop's SSD to an external HDD without too much trouble, taking a couple of hours. Now, I'm trying to copy folders from the external HDD back onto itself into a new folder for a duplicate detection software I'm using. However, it's taken over 5 hours and I'm still not halfway through the process. I'm wondering if the way I'm initiating the copy is inefficient or if there are limitations due to HDD head movements that are slowing down the transfer. Could this be the problem, or is there something else I've overlooked?
2 Answers
When you first copied your files from SSD to HDD, it was just a write operation. Now, though, you’re reading from the HDD and writing back to it at the same time, which naturally slows down the transfer rate. This is to be expected, but it sounds like it’s slower than you anticipated.
The speed of your transfer really depends on the size and number of files. If you're transferring thousands of small files, it can drag things down, no matter how good your connection is. Large files usually transfer faster and can utilize the connection more effectively. Just make sure that your external HDD is plugged into a USB 3 port to maximize the speed!
I've got about 140,000 files, mostly between 1.5MB to 6MB, but there are some big videos too, around 2GB. Could that be why it’s taking so long?
Yeah, that makes sense. I thought it wouldn’t be *this* slow since the specs say it can do 120MB/s, but I'm only getting about 6% of that. Did I miss something?