Posted on 02/27/2025 4:49:19 PM PST by Angelino97
Several months ago I bought a new laptop, 128 GB RAM, 13th Generation i9 CPU, running Win 11.
Should be faster than my nine-years old laptop, 32 GB RAM, i7 CPU, Win 7.
Two days ago I bought two external HDDs (Western Digital Passports), 6 TB each.
I then copied (drag & drop method) a folder from an old WD passport to the new, larger one. Folder contained over 2,900 MP4 files, 29 subfolders, at about 1.97 TB total.
It took over 8 hours to copy.
Then verified that all the files were copied by clicking Properties on the old and copied folders. My new laptop counted the 2,900+ files on the old WD HDD in a few minutes. But it took over 5 hours to just to COUNT the 2,900+ files in the new HDD.
I thought, maybe it's an indexing issue? Win 11 hasn't indexed the new HDD?
But then I copied the same files onto the second new HDD. It again took over 8 hours to copy. And the counting was again so slow that after a couple of files had been counted, I tried counting the files on my old Win 7 laptop.
I attached the new HDD to the old laptop, clicked Properties, and the files were counted INSTANTLY.
So the problem isn't the new WD HDDs.
Why does it take forever to Win 11 to copy, and even to count, files on a new HDD (but not on the old HDD)?
i find linux to be quite slow too when i right click and choose properties- seems like it takes a long time to get to the amount of space on the drive- windows 10 seems to be almost instant-
Did you format your hard drives or use them out of the box as is?
Had the exact problem. Took me a few to realize that caching was turned off on some of my external drives. Pop into Disk Managment and see if that’s the problem. If that looks good, then make sure the ports are what they need to be (3.x). If that’s all good, then go into safe mode and see what happens.
If all else fails, ask Copilot. ;)
Good luck!
I thought I was the only one still using a computer. All the cell phone users look at me like I’m an alien or something.
And it already had a couple of folders on it with WD software, which I didn't use.
Use them out of the box.
Are you running any virus software that may be scanning when copying?
i have a freshly installed windows 10 and 11 on triple boot and have put on the programs i want on both, and done macrium reflect backups- as time goes on, and they slow down I’ll revert it back to the backup- don’t know if that will continue to keep it ‘speedy’ or not- but gonna try- any files i keep are kept on another drive-
But yeah, gotta really work hard at keeping windows working good- even my old windows 7 was slowing down pretty bad- woiudl get to desktop and just sit and sit until it was good and ready to let me begin using it-
No. Not unless Win 11’s security is doing a virus scam.
You probably “saturated” the USB bus...it is probably much quicker to copy the old external drive to the new laptop internal hard disk, then copy from the new laptop internal HD to the new external hard drive.
“USB 4” & “Thunderbolt 5”(newest Macs) are the newest/fastest external interfaces (much faster than USB 3.2).
Every version of Windows has larger overhead/more bloat...so your new i9/Win11 machine will probably be about as fast as your old i7/Win7 machine. (unless you “debloat” it):
https://christitus.com/windows-tool/
Scroll down to: Resize the master file table:
https://www.techtarget.com/searchwindowsserver/tip/Optimizing-NTFS-file-system-performance
USB 3.0 is still pretty slow copying that much data. Try robocopy it’s much quicker. You can also use Veeam (it’s free) which would allow you to backup one hard drive into a disk image and then you clone the other drive with it which is pretty quick if the drive is an ssd.
You probably need to turn the computer on
Maybe a USB problem? If you are connecting via USB.
That's why I always reformat the drive and download and install a clean copy of Windows when I get a new computer.
Wow, that is strange. I don’t think I have encountered that before...
Drag n drop via the GUI is fine for small files (size and number), but displaying the copy speed, eta eye candy gets exponentially compute expensive with the number of files that are copied in one drag.
A comprehensive how to for the Linux swap would be great to find.
I fear going down a rabbit hole with driver hunting.
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