USB Copying kills my PC but works in Explorer.

[nihilist]

Hi there.

I've noticed a very frustrating issue. When I copy to a USB disk with TMCD, my pc lags in a specific way: opening up new applications takes ages, even notepad takes 5 seconds to load. When copying is finished, my PC is fine. CPU usage is hardly above 10%, kernel times around 3% but applications that are running are fine, unless they access disk. So ie: While copying to USB, movies still play fine, Firefox is still responsive but opening new apps is slow.

And then I tried to copy with Explorer and the problem went almost completely away. There's a dramatic difference between the IO lag between TCMD and Explorer.

but I'm starting to suspect strongly that it's Total Commander now. I'm doing more tests.

Is this a known issue / common thing?

I've been a Norton Commander -> WINCMD(TCMD now) user since around 1993 or so.. pleeease don't make me have to use explorer again, I tried it today.. it was horrible!

[nihilist]

Sorry, forgot to add more details:

At first I thought it was my chipset, as I have the Intel 965 on both my Thinkpad and my desktop at home.

This happens on both machines, but much less of an issue on my desktop at home.

Specs are:
notebook: Thinkpad T61 7100 (1.8ghz c2d) 4gb ram, 500gb HDD
desktop: Q6600 @3ghz, 6GB ram, 1TB disk.

And I'm using win7 x64 on both machines but I've had this issue on XP/Vista 32 and 64bit as well in the past.

Here's a copy/paste of my original post on Notebook Review's forums with more in depth details as I can't post URLs yet

Hey guys.

Here's a strange issue I'm having, I don't think it's Thinkpad specific, because I have the same issue at home on my Q6600 which also has the Intel 965 chipset. When I copy to a USB HDD, my PC crawls at times. Opening up task manager takes up to 8 seconds on my T61 when this is happening, it's much less of an issue on my Q6600 though, I attribute that to the faster CPU.

This is a fairly clean install, I have hardly any services running on my machine and it's also happened on brand new fresh installs of XP32/64; Vista32/64; Win7x 64.

It happens with any USB disk I plug in.
As mentioned it's non-OS specific.

CPU load dances around 4-10% and kernel times is only about 3%

Symptoms: Opening up applications is painfully slow, notepad took 5 seconds to open. Firefox is much longer.

Running applications, or once apps have opened they are fine.

if I stop the copying, it snaps back to normal.

Copy speed is about 20MB/s to the drive I'm doing now.

I have tried several different disks in different enclosures and multiple cables.

Disk are fine with no bad sectors.

Have tried all 3 of my USB ports, same issue.

No difference between 2.5" bus powered or externally powered 3.5" USB disks.

My disks are not running in PIO mode. (Is that even possible on SATA?)

I can reproduce the issue every time by just copying to the HDD.

Are there tweaks I can use? It seems that this chipset gets overly saturated with IO.

[HolgerK]

Questions:

- TC-Version you are using?

- Single copy job or multiple copy jobs at once in background?

- What are your copy settings?
"Configuration -> Options... -> operation: Copy/Delete"

- Does it help to change the copy mode to "Use standard copy method (recommended)" or "Use copy+paste via explorer"?

Regards
Holger

[nihilist]

Under copy options I have:

Ticked: Use dstandard
Unticked: copy use time/date
Unticked: Use explorer delete..
Ticked: F8/Del..

I'm on 7.55a, I'll install 7.56a just now, though I have the same issues at home on 756a

Yes it's one copy job of a single 80GB file.

I'll try the Explorer copy/paste thing later on, and report back, but i have a flight to catch later today, will try report back before I leave.

Thanks for the reply

[nihilist]

Another thing,

I also get this at home, when I copy files (usually large 1-3GB files) to my Linux server and I'm streaming a movie, the movie will stall and skip/pause etc; but using Explorer to copy leaves the movies playing fine.

I'm wondering if Explorer leaves some 'slack' or has some sort of load balancing to prevent the issues I'm having?

Not sure if it's related, just thought it might be worth mentioning.

[HolgerK]

First: Windows vista and 7 take much more use of system memory for file system caching than previous operating systems.
Especially if you are copying from a fast to a slow device, the system may use a large increasing buffer to hold data from the fast device.
This may lead to a swapping of already loaded dll into the page file, so that in consequence starting applications will be slowed down because the images must be loaded again from the page file or hard disk.
Additional if your source drive is on the same physical disk as the system drive, it is normal that necessary system drive disk access will be slowed down while the IO system is busy to deliver data for the copy process.
But this effect should be the same regardless of using TC or Explorer for copying.

Tip: Try to use the non standard "copy method (for experts)".
This method should bypass the system cache.
Keep in mind that this copy method may rarely lead to corrupted copies with some USB or NAS drives (incompatibility with some devices/drivers optimized for explorer usage). You should test the integrity of the copy at least once per device (using a checksum MD5, SHA1 or a verification with TC's file compare).

Copy speed is about 20MB/s to the drive I'm doing now
...
This happens on both machines, but much less of an issue on my desktop at home.

A speed of 20MB/s seconds while copying a huge file to an external HD is less than i would expect (even if the connection is USB2.0).

- What are your power saving options?
Try to set "balanced" or "high performance".
At less than 10% CPU load it is very probably that the system changes the power saving state of several devices (e.g. putting devices into sleep mode). Waking them up again and again may lead to such stutter and slow IO-Performance.

Regards
Holger