hi, the transfer rate on my hard drive sometimes seems slow. i get 20mb/sec when copying between partitions on the same drive and 5mb/sec when copying from dvd-rom to hard drive. does anybody know what the average figures are for this activity? the hard drive is a 160gb sata 7200rpm 8mb buffer. thanks, kris

No problem there, copying from dvd will naturally be much slower then from hard drive, dvd read speed is limited to speed of the dvd drive. In other words you can't write any faster then what the drive can read the data. "Hard-drive transfer rate poor" is misleading you can't compare a hard drive to a dvd, which is what you are complaining about.

hi, thanks for responding, you misunderstood my first post or perhaps my post wasnt clear. i was querying both speeds, not just the dvd transfer rate.

Copying between partition on a drive and partitions on different drives and partions on drives on different controller channels very because a channel can only transfer to one device at a time. The worse being from one partition to another on the same drive. The best between partitions on different drives on different channels. This is dependent on the operating system and motherboard design. There have been major blunders in both that have more than halved the speed of data transfer.