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

archive then move?

[vjl]

Have you tried to archive/compress them first [gzip/zip/etc], then move the big file over? Lots of small files take longer to move than fewer larger files. /vjl/

Re:archive then move?

[blincoln]

Robocopy is approximately a hundred trillion trillion trillion times better than xcopy.

To put that in perspective, you would need to weld fourteen quadrillion VW Beetles end to end, then use the resulting Beetle Bar as a lever and an object with the displacement of eleven million Libraries of Congress as the fulcrum in order to give xcopy the same Windows command-line file copying power as Robocopy.

Move the old hard drive, then copy

[TheArtfulTodger]

Why not just plug the old hard drive on the secondary channel on the new PC, reboot and then just file copy? Or do I need to reread the question?

Re:Move the old hard drive, then copy

[BrynM]

The problem with doing that is Windows can detect the "magic" folders... Mods: If you don't know what "magic" is, please mod some other comment. Thank you.

Do you mean the software named "Magic Folders"? Or perhaps you have some kind of Folder of Holding with compression created by a high-level Magic User. Most likely you mean the Special Folders that are used by Windows, but then again you may just be spouting about something you actually know little about.

Or maybe you should just explain yourself and not flame the mods... You might even get modded +Insightful or +Informative then and you would have the advantage of explaining your term to the person you were answering - thus being genuinely helpful.

Re:Move the old hard drive, then copy

[BrynM]

BTW, I learned the term "magic" from the Microsoft tool "tweakgui". I didn't invent it.

I looked in TweakUI and it calls them "Special Folders" as well. My point is: Be careful about how you present things that you may only have cursory knowledge of here on Slashdot. I was being funny about it, but there are planty of users out there who will ream you for bad information. Instead of being authorative and telling the mods what to do, you could have replied in the form of a question such as "You could try, but won't windows have problems with the magic folders?" or something like that. Further, you could disclaim being an authority and just post something along the lines of "I think that...".

Ok, I'm done being a slashdot post nazi now :D

From my experience, XP stores the hard locations (ie: c:\Documents and Settings\BrynM\My Documents") for the special folders it needs in the registry. I've never had a problem slapping a previously used drive into a machine to copy files (I did this exact thing to recover files after and IDE failure that was corrupting NTFS just a couple of weeks ago). If you've had problems or know of them, then please post that.

Here

[abscissa]

Here you go.

Firewire is crippled in Windows by default. You need the patch here to restore functionality.

Re:Here

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, discussion is over. Everyone go home.

File size is the problem

[inio]

Your file size, and disk seek time, are the problem. Lets say your drive has a 5ms seek time (that's pretty damn fast). writing each file actually requires three writes: to the file allocation tabe, to the directory, and the contents of the file itself. Assuming the writes take another 5ms, that's 20ms per file. that limits you to 50 files per second. At 200kiB per file that's about 10 megs per second.

Re:It's the hard drive, not the fire-wire

[ArbitraryConstant]

Firewire 400 is 400 megabits per second.

A modern SATA drive can do just shy of 70 megabytes per second, which is 560 megabits.

Re:Pay attention to units

[BillyBlaze]

Nope, 400 mbps would be .4 bits per second, which is .05 bytes per second, or about .000071 Libraries of Congress per millenium.

Optimize for performance

[Svenne]

No one's mentioned this?

Bring up the properties of the firewire disk in "Device Manager". Go to the Policies tab and make sure it's set to "Optimize for performance".