r/pcmasterrace • u/AutoModerator • Jul 14 '15

Daily Simple Questions Thread - Jul 14, 2015

Got a simple question? Get a simple answer!

This thread is for all of the small and simple questions that you might have about computing that probably wouldn't work all too well as a standalone post. Software issues, build questions, game recommendations, post them here!

For the sake of helping others, please don't downvote questions! To help facilitate this, comments are sorted randomly for this post, so anyone's question can be seen and answered.

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u/MonkeyMaster64 RX 480, Ryzen 5 1600, 16GB RAM Jul 14 '15

What determines the speed at which files copy and paste?

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u/xD512 http://imgur.com/a/7f6Qx Jul 14 '15

For large files it's the slowes device the files have to go through. If you copy files from one HDD to another and both are connected through SATA3 the HDD you're copying to is the bottleneck (write speeds are usually slower than read speeds).

If you copy from one SSD to another and both are connected through SATA2 the SATA2 protocoll is the limit because SSDs are a lot faster than HDDs and SATA2 only has a speed of about 2.8 Gbit/s or 358 MByte/s.

Generally speaking you can copy few large files faster than many small ones, but I don't really know why.