how improve transfer rate speed for hard drive transfer

each hard drive is western digital hard drive WD20Ears with 2 TB as capacity, 3 gb/s as interface speed , 64 Mb as cache memory , 7400 RPM

i heard about burstcopy software to increase the transfer speed rate but it is working only on win 98, win me, win xp.
it isn't compatible for win 7, do you know any other software ??

WD20EARS are relatively low-speed, low-power drives designed more for energy conservation than speed.

The following factors could be causing the slowdown you're seeing:

(a)  RAID overhead if your RAID-5 is a software RAID.    You would get MUCH better performance with a good hardware RAID controller.

(b)  If you're copying a lot of small files and don't have write caching enabled.

(c)  You're copying to the inner cylinders of the drives (which are much slower than the outer cylinders)

Note that the interface speed is virtually irrelevant ... it's the sustained transfer rate that really matters.    But even the low-power EARS drives should do better than what you're seeing.

I suspect that (a) and possible (b) are the most likely culprits in this specific case.

You may Use 64 bit OS version..if not.

yes i am using 64 bit OS version ,and i don't use software Raid, it is hardware Raid and the hardware for the raid controller is installed directly when installing windows 7.
should i try to found any upgrade for the controller driver ? or any firmware upgrade ??.
and i am enabling the write caching

What RAID controller are you using?
... and is it configured with battery-backed cache?

The highest performance units are from Areca, 3Ware, LSI, and Adaptec.

Note that you'd get much better performance with any of these controllers if you were using enterprise class hard drives rather than the low-power EARS units.

I have 4x wd20-ears drives in a raid 5 on the built in raid of an Asus p5q pro turbo mono. Initially I could only get 10 mb sec whilst copying a 20gb test file. Then I enabled cache on the array (using) intel rst and got 20MB/sec.

As I final step I upgraded to intel rst 9.6, enabled drive cache and now it writes at over 100MB/sec.

Not sure what hardware raid you are using but is it full hardware (adaptec/3ware/etc) or using the motherboards onboard raid controller. If the later, that is software assisted raid.

Final note, enabling all of the caches can cause corruption if you suddenly loose power.

I suspect the primary  issue is indeed a cache that's not enabled ... as I noted earlier, that's (b) in my list.

i am using the onboard raid controller.
i installed win 7,nothing else and try the transfer speed rate from and to the raid.
my workstation is hp xw4600.
what should i installed from the hp website?

what should i use for raid controller ?? i am using onboard raid controller, should i use a pci raid controller ? if yes ,which one should i buy ??

Your system has 2 PCIe x16 slots and one PCIe x8 slot  ==> any of those will be good for a RAID controller.    This is an excellent one:  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816131003

i check in my device manager that i have this hardware :
intel ich8r/ich9r/ich10r/do/5 serires /3400 series Sata Raid controller

is it good ??

It's okay ... but certainly not in the same league as a good PCIe controller.

As we noted above, you may be able to improve your performance by checking the cache settings ... but it will never match the performance you could get with a high-end add-in controller.

ok - so mine is running the ich10r with 4 WD20-EARS disks in a raid5 and it flies. For the record though, that's not considered a hardware controller. It is a software assisted RAID.

Install the intel RST v9.6 and then you can enable the cache for the "array" then select the individual disks and enable the disk cache too. You will see much higher speeds.

I just ran a test and I get 160-170MB sec.  

And proof....

 

thanks youu so much, it is working now very fast .