Windows 11, copying files between hard drives painfully slow

Same here. Any file operations are tortuously slow on an NvMe.

Moving files from one partition to another - 294MB is showing as 1 hour and 25 minutes.

The same 294MB from one nvme to another is ‘about an hour’.

Everything was fine until I recently had to do an in-place repair of Windows due to (the latest) Windows Update fiasco. I went from 22H2 to 23H2 and the slow file operations has been reintroduced!

Good old Microsoft ! No matter how fast hardware becomes, the OS will always bring things to a crashing halt.

You shouldnt have to use robocopy. I have been having this issue since windows 10. copying from local to NAS drives

All 2TB and 4TB SSDs

It is a Microsoft patch problem which they have not acknowledged. As you can see it affects many people. If you can roll back the last 2 or 3 months of updates on win 11 or (windows 10) the problem goes away until the system is again updated. I have not been able to isolate the exact patch, my second notebook screen broke and I have to work, and **** ME WORKING PATCHES ARE MICROSOFT’S RESPONSIBILITY, *BEFORE THEY INFLICT IT ON US*.

ALL these were done on W10 and W11 machines with more than a dozen USB drives of multiple types. * formally working perfectly and 6 brand new, never used out of the box

It is not a bad or old USB drive.

ALL USB drives have this fault manifested on W10 and 11.

I have tested brand new straight out of the box drives from EMTEC, SAN DISK and VERBATIIM

Total download speeds as low as 32 Kbyte a second when copying 10 GB of files

It is not the wrong file system.

Formatting as exFAT, FAT32, or NTFS makes absolutely no difference. BTW the people suggesting that SSD and USB flash drives should be NTFS are wrong.. NTFS causes much more wear because of all the extra data file information and there is visible change in performance.

It is not a worn out drive or a fragmented drive.

Brand new USB drives with NO files already on them still have this problem. Fragmentation is not an issue with Flash drives or SSD. Fragmentation only affects mechanical drives with rotating cylinders and mechanical heads. Data can't be read until the head and the data on the cylinders are in the right position.

Also this problem occurred suddenly not gradually - this means something "wearing out" is highly unlikely.

It is not a USB drive loading a USB 1.x version driver instead of a version 2.x driver.

I tested with flask drives that used a USB2.x interface and USB3.x interfaces. The problem affects both. Also the data rates for copying large amounts of data (multiple files or large file) are even slower than usb1.x. The slow rate might be compatible with USB HID but that would be a stupid claim and unsupportable.

It is not a virus.

After 2 months Microsoft Defender cannot find a virus or a root kit. Neither can Malaware Bytes.

I have tested this carefully and found this staggering slowdown exists with both fully patched windows 10 and 11 with only very common, non invasive software (no weird low level drives, pirate software or background application.

My computer used are an Acer Aspire 5 and 8GB ram, 250GB hard drive, 100GB free, Windows 11. And a Acer Swift 1 with 4GB ram and Windows 10 (this is the one I broke by in an accident - parts are coming)

I was for more than 10 years a senior computer technician at Queensland University of Technology and I hold an Associate Diploma of Electrical Engineering (Industrial control and microcomputers).

Has anyone else experiencing extremely long times for copying one hard drive to another?

I'm trying to copy all the files from a standard 3.5" hard drive to an SSD.

It's almost 1TB of data but the speeds continuosly drop to less than 1MB/s when in safe mode, as running the PC in it's normal mode stalled the copying process with it showing 0KB/s.

I am on the latest version of Windows and with the newest updates with the apparent bug fix.

I am on day 3 of copying these files.

I have tried all the "fixes" that show up on Google and both hard drives have "full control" by myself/all users.

Hoping someone can help.

My ten year old Windows7 laptop copied x10 faster than my new windows11! (both i5)
The W7 crashed 2 times in ten years and run five apps and 15tabs simultaneously! the W11 can barely start without glitching.
NOT to mention the horendous right click (that needs five more clicks to do what I previously did with one click; same with start button.
And that monstrous music player :( not animation, no side view of playlist, and hiden soundbar that I have to click... to open... to change volume!!! :(((
Windows 7 was the pinacle of OS!

For the question I read somewere that when copying, W11 is ALL the time searching ALL the files, EVERY file(!!!) before copying for avoiding double copying or something... that is why it takes 12minutes for a 10GB folder to copy.

I repeat, my ten year old W7 did the same in 2minutes or less with not one mistake ever! It was flawless! (WHY change it??)

And W7 run on HDD!!! when the new W11 runs SSD!!!

said it.

Don't use Windows (File Explorer): is horribly slow on small files transfer in particular... and MS doesn't seem to care.

Try tools like DSyncronize