Speeding up Firewire File Transfers?

Milo_Mindbender asks: "I've got a pretty common problem: copying a ton of files from an old Windows XP computer to a new one. After noticing how long transfers were taking over my 100mbps Ethernet, I hooked up a IEEE1394/Firewire cable and things were much faster. Strangely though, Windows is still only using about 10% of the cable's 400mbps bandwidth. Does anyone know any tips/tricks for speeding this up or any Shareware mass-file-copy tools that would be faster than Explorer/file sharing? Right now, the older machine is setup with Windows file sharing and the new machine is copying from it, neither machine is using much CPU and the disks are nowhere near their max speed. The number and size of the files might be what's slowing it down, since it's gigabytes of files in the 100-200k size range."

Comments

Re:Many Major Problems:

[ArbitraryConstant]

"Your drive doesn't keep up with Firewire. Sorry, but it's true. Disks aren't as fast as you think -- particularly that cheap ATA thing you are using."

Firewire 400 is 400 mbit/s. A modern 7200 rpm SATA desktop drive can sustain just shy of 70 mbyte/s, which is 560 mbit/s.

Re:Have you tried this?

[Zork the Almighty]

How is it that the most useful comment in the whole thread is not modded informative ? This could easily be the problem! Mod up!