slow file transfer between disks?

[c-roc]

I have three ATA 7200 rpm drives and copying a few 700mb files between them goes at around 17MB/s. I don't know how fast windows was, but it sure seemed faster. It should be faster, no?
Fresh install of Ubuntu 8.04, all drives are EXT3

[c-roc]

oh, and hdparm -l for the source disk is 53MB/s and the destination disk is 77MB/s.

I just drag/dropped, and cut/pasted a single 700MB file, and got the same results, around 17MB/s.

[c-roc]

can anyone point me in the right direction?

[hcaicedo]

Same problem here.
When i test hard drive with hdparm -tT /dev/sd :

Timing cached reads: 404 MB in 2.00 seconds = 201.89 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 124 MB in 3.03 seconds = 40.86 MB/sec

But when I am doing a copy whit Nautilus shows : 1.7 MB/s


Same hard drive brand on different computer :

Timing cached reads: 6272 MB in 2.00 seconds = 3138.79 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 288 MB in 3.01 seconds = 95.77 MB/sec


Any idea what is happening ?

[kuja]

There's a lot more to things than brand.

Higher capacity drives read and write faster, because the read/write heads don't have to travel as far. A larger cache helps things also. Also, SATA hard drives are definitely faster than their IDE brethren.

Reading/writing most of the time is very differnet than a buffered or cached read also. Those are benchmarks of different things than normal data transfer.

17MiB/s is probably about normal.

[hcaicedo]

maybe 17 MB/sec is OK, but 1.7 MB/sec on a sata hard drive? . I put 3 new hard drives same brand same specs on two different computers. One is a desktop the other one is server. On my desktop the hard drive is very fast. On the server can't have more than 1.7 MB/s.