in mb/s. in vista (ultimate) with 4gb of ram.
Let’s say the drive has a two logical partitions and I transfer a large file from one to the other. What transfer speed, roughly, should I expect to see?
and the same for transfer from a raid0 drive pair to a non-raid external drive connected via usb2?
Transferring from one partition to the other isnt going to be any faster than moving files around on an existing HD, because you are doing the same thing.
Transferring from the raid0 to the external host is more likely to be limited to your external host’s speed, or the connection. Also, it depends on the specs of your drive. What is its rated throughput, etc. You are never going to max it because there is always overhead associated with the protocols used for data transfer.
My setup is fairly close to what you describe - two 750GB drives set up as one RAID-0 volume and divided into 2 partitions. They are WD Green drives though, so they may be 5400 rpm (WD doesn’t say exactly). And it has Windows XP Pro.
Anyway I just did a very unscientific test, copying a couple of large files from one partition to the other and timing it with my wristwatch. The 1455 MB file took about 38 seconds, and the 1713 MB file took about 46 seconds. So that’s about 37~38 MB/s.
I don’t have a USB external drive handy right now but I’d guess the USB bus would be the bottleneck.
I got 50 MB/S sustained writing to a 1TB WD Green drive, over eSATA. I would guess that a 2 drive RAID would be close to twice that, as long as your interface was fast enough. This was on OS X.
Not true. When you transfer a file from one place to another on the same partition, all that happens is the file’s address is changed. So no matter how large the file - the transfer will be fairly instant.
When drives are partitioned, they are divided up and when moving a file from one partition to another the file’s data has to be moved (not just an address change) so that the file resides in the other partition.
Now that I’ve seen a few answers I shall reveal my transfer speed - I’m getting between 60 and 80 mb/s. I guess it’s ok but I’m not sure if it’s as fast as it could be. It makes me wonder if my setup isn’t right or could be better. Having said that the windows performance score for the hard disk is 5.9
Can anyone explain this though - when I move a large file from one partition to another the move appears to be instant. When I copy, the window comes up showing me the transfer speed and the green progress bar. Does vista manage partitions in some weird way where data doesn’t have to be moved when files are moved from one partition to another??
USB has an upper threshold of 480 Mbps, or 60MBps. Real-world numbers would be closer to 40 MBps, so it’s hard to say whether USB would be the limiting factor for you.