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

Here

[abscissa]

Here you go.

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

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: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.