Windows 8 slow file copy....

Not really something I've made or fixed but, rather, a problem I've solved.

A few weeks ago one of the 1TB drives in my Raid1 (Mirror) array failed. But it was OK because the remaining 1TB drive in the array was still working and my data was safe. I should say here that the OS (Windows 8 x64) is installed on a separate drive which is not part of the array. Then, more recently, I auto upgraded Windows 8 to 8.1. The upgrade went smoothly but when I came to update my media libraries in the Music App, it was apparent something had gone very wrong. For whatever reason, the upgrade had wrecked the partition on the remaining 1TB drive and the files (of which there were many precious ones) were totally inaccessible. Having tried a few data recovery programs, the only one which seemed capable of recovering the files in the original directory structure and with their original names was GetData's Recover My Files.

So, with a copy duly purchased and a fresh 1TB drive to hand, I recovered all my files - about 900GB worth. At this point I decided to make a new array using brand new 2TB drives. This went without incident and I now have 1.8TB of usuable space. But the main problem was with transferring the files from the 1TB drive to the new Raid array. The transfer would start ok with the drives in the array writing at about 70MB/s but after about 10 seconds the transfer would slow to a crawl or completely stop, although the Task Manager also showed that disk activity remained at 100%. A few minutes would pass and the process would start again, and then stop, and so on. At a rough calculation, it was going to take about three weeks to transfer the data. So, I Googled for a solution. I tried many of the different things suggested (switching off Defender, disabling indexing, disabling thumbnails, and so on). About an hour ago I was ready to give up but thought I'd have one last go, starting from fresh. This meant deleting and then remaking the array. In Disk Management, I received the usual message about the new "drive" and the option to make it either MBR or GPT. This got me thinking. When I first started this exercise yesterday I checked the difference between MBR and GPT and since the total usable size of my array was less than 2TB, I'd selected MBR. This time I picked GPT and the problem with the slow/peculiar data transfer is no more.

Just thought I'd share that in case it helps anyone else.

More soon, no doubt....

D