Further to our earlier article regarding the Vista bug (or should that be undocumented feature?) in which files operations between drives slows the machine to a crawl or worse, it seems a workaround may have been discovered by users contributing to the Microsoft forums.
Apparently the problem occurs when copying to an IDE drive which is not the only IDE device connected to the port, i.e. it’s acting as a slave or master and is sharing the interface with another device - regardless of the fact that both are configured correctly.
The solution in this case is to disconnect the second device and relocate it to a different IDE port so that your hard drive is the only device on that particular IDE interface.
In the case of SATA drives, it seems that a possible solution is to connect drives to different SATA controllers. Obviously, you will need one of the boards that contains two different SATA controllers to try this, or a secondary add-in controller board.
Although this is not an ideal solution and may cause inconvenience to some, it may resolve the problem in the short term until Microsoft come up with a proper fix.
22 responses so far ↓
Adam // May 21, 2007 at 2:20 pm
All very good, unless you have a laptop with one drive partitioned and experience the same problem copying between partitions.
MS really need to fix this.
John Sherwin // May 21, 2007 at 4:35 pm
I’m guessing that in your case, Adam, that Vista sees both partitions as being seperate drives connected to the same interface, which is leading to the problem we have unfortunately become familiar with.
Totally agree with you that this needs fixing asap - workarounds are all well and good for techies and people who are in a position to implement them, but it really does beggar belief that Microsoft’s latest and greatest isn’t capable of performing simple file operations - something that DOS was quite capable of doing right back in the early days (otherwise known as the dark ages, for younger readers!)
robsonn // May 22, 2007 at 6:35 am
Same problem occurs copying from a folder to folder on same drive though. this is no fix. it has got to be done by MS.
John Sherwin // May 22, 2007 at 6:56 am
I agree, robsonn. It’s not in any way a fix - just a possible workaround for people who are able to implement it until such time as MS get their fingers out and issue a patch.
Rutten // June 7, 2007 at 1:00 pm
With all due respect, this is useless. Didn’t work.
John Sherwin // June 7, 2007 at 5:59 pm
Different things seem to work for different people, which is why the various suggestions are offered here to try and help people. There isn’t a definitive solution to this bug, nor will there be one until MS releases a patch to properly address the problem.
Jesse Kropf // June 13, 2007 at 11:03 pm
I have this problem all the time on a laptop with a single SATA drive. I notice it the most when I download a file of maybe 2MB, some little utility or something, and before I can use it I have to wait a good 20 or 30 seconds for Vista to copy it from the temporary download location to the location I saved it in. It’s quite annoying.
I’ve noticed that “moving” a file is almost instantaneous, since all that needs to be changed is the MFT, addresses to the file pieces. But copying files is very very slow, and that *is* to another location on the same partition. I only have one Windows partition. And I don’t feel like booting into Linux just to move some files around…
Windows Vista 檔案總管於 copy, move, delete 檔案時停止回應 - 精神奕奕 // June 25, 2007 at 2:34 pm
[...] 國外的 blog 有人說是跟 IDE/SATA 的 port 有關 [...]
Meany // July 15, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Vista is ASS. My workaround for this is to zip stuff up, copy them over from one drive to another using Command prompt then unzip it once it’s copied over. While it’s copying unzipping, you can sit back and reflect on the fact that Vista can’t do what my first computer, a freakin AST 486 was capable of doing, that is copy a 5mb file from one drive to another without taking 30 minutes. What a POS.
Danneman // July 23, 2007 at 2:29 pm
This is indeed a very interesting “feature”.
On my PC which runs very good on Vista Ultimate in general terms, the file transfer is behaving suspiciously. Copying files between USB drives (Large ones above a gig) gives me a speed around 20-23 MB/s, which I suppose is OK considering the specs of 400 mbit. However, copying between partitions on my Raptor system drive gives the same speed (!) which leads me to believe that this is an intentional “feature”. Something must be restricting the speed in order to “inspect” the files and depending on Processor/memory etc the top speed (in my case 23 MB/s) varies. Some users reports KByte transfer rates I hear…
Maybe DRM is playing havoc…
JMS // July 24, 2007 at 10:26 am
I installed the Vista Update intended to make ipod transfers more reliable and it works fine now.
Getting transfer rates in excess of 50MB/s between SATA drives and 35MB+ when copying to IDE drives.
hrg // July 26, 2007 at 4:35 pm
JMS which update is that? Did you notice any improvement for network transfers as well?
Has anyone else tried this?
JMS // July 27, 2007 at 8:51 am
Hi hrg, it was KB936824. It may just be a conincidence, or MS might have snook in a fix with that update, but soon after I’d installed it, I noticed that I no longer had the slow copy/delete problem.
JMS // July 27, 2007 at 8:54 am
I haven’t been able to test it on network problems as my network transfers were fine, but KB931770 is specifically designed to fix slow network transfers. I believe quite a few have had some success with this, so it’s worth giving it a go.
hrg // July 27, 2007 at 11:32 am
JMS thank you very much for your quick reply and the tips. I’ll try the updates you mention and I’ll let you know. Cheers!
darkxiiindp // July 28, 2007 at 3:53 am
Thanks JMS. It work. \o/
JMS // July 28, 2007 at 5:03 am
I’m delighted - if you know anyone who is also experiencing this problem, please let them know.
Toby Horton // August 7, 2007 at 11:39 pm
I have this problem moving files between folders on a mirrored raptor set, which is also the system drive.
One thing I have noticed is that after clicking move I can check the destination and the files are all there but the progress bar is still calculating. I can then click cancel and everything is fine…
Figure that one out.
JMS // August 9, 2007 at 10:57 pm
I can do better than that, Toby.
Although it hasn’t appeared on Windows Update yet, Microsoft has released an official fix for the problem. Get it ahead of it’s WU debut (in 32-bit and 64-bit versions) here:
http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?kbid=938979
Maximus // December 20, 2007 at 8:55 am
I would like to see a continuation of the topic
Rebecca // February 2, 2008 at 2:15 am
It seems the issue lies with how MANY files are to be copied. Not the size of the files. I only have one partition on this laptop and I run into the same problems…
For example: Extracting a ZIP with 600 small files (for a total of ~3mb) took around 10mins. Unacceptable. Now, copying 100mb file takes WAY less time. Extracting a larger file from a ZIP archive takes less than 2 mins on my machine.
The wow in vista // June 5, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Trying to delete a folder with lots of files about 820 MB.
It’s been cranking along now at 0 bytes/sec and says it wants to take another hour and 24 minutes to delete my freaking files.
What the hell is this piece of crap doing? It’s easy to create the files in a flash but it takes forever to remove them, so it’s obviosly archiving it somewhere even though I specifically did a shift+delete action.
For this the whole vista os can go into the recycle bin as far as i’m concerned now.
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