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Number   :  2580
Date     :  2002-08-01
Author   :  pwantzel
Subject  :  SLOW copying in ONE directory only
Size(KB) :  1


I'm using xxcopy to back up one hard drive to another hard drive. 
Using "xxcopy [source] [destination] /clone". I've noticed that ONE 
directory (out of hundreds) copies much slower than everything else. 
Most of the time, I get 4-5 MB/sec transfer rate. In this one 
directory I get a transfer rate that varies up and down but is always 
much slower than this and sometimes gets as slow as about 2 sec/file 
(no difference in speed with files between 10K and 1M in size). And 
the destination hard drive access light is lit for about half of this 
2 seconds/file.

I thought it might relate to the number of files in this directory 
(5800 files) but I have another directory with 9000 similar files 
that doesn't have this problem. I defragmented (with Norton 
SpeedDisk) and it's still the same. I tried copying the same files 
with the DOS copy command, and this works fine (no long delays). 
Same with xcopy (works fine). I tried xxcopy with just this 
directory (not the whole hard disk) and got the same problem. 

I have noticed that most of the names of the files in this directory 
have one or more hyphens in them. I also noticed that the transfer 
rate tends to speed up when copying files whose names do not include 
hyphens and then slow down again when copying files with names that 
do include hyphens.

System is PIII 866MHz, 512MB RAM, running Win98SE. Source drive is 
WD ATA66, destination drive is IBM ATA100, both running on Promise 
Ultra66 (ATA66) controller.

Anyone have any ideas what's going on here?



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