Windows 10: Why do data transfer rates vary so widely?

Pardon me if this question has been addressed, but I couldn't get the search function to find this particular topic. When using the internal copy function to transfer files from a system's hard drive to an external hard drive, the data transfer rate seems to vary widely, ranging from less than 10 Kbs to more than 70 Mbs, a factor of more than 1000. This is observed on a plain vanilla Windows 10 system with absolutely nothing other than the data transfer running except for system internals. The transfer is handling around 200 Gigabytes of data in around 30,000 files. Any thoughts?

:)

 

Understanding data transfer rates

The numbers in Task Manager and Resource Monitor make sense but I don't follow your calculations.

Task Manager is showing a raw transfer rate of 5.0 Mb/s. That is 5,000,000 bits per second. As there are 8 bits per byte that equates to 5,000,000/8 or 625,000 Bytes per second. That is considerably higher than the 483,000 shown in Resource Monitor but that is easily explained. Task Manager is showing the total data transferred over the network interface while Resource Monitor is showing the actual transfer rate to the file in question. TCP/IP is a complex protocol with multiple levels of overhead. 483,000/625,000=.7728, or about 77.28% transfer efficiency.

 

How to see the real time data transfer rate during a file transfer?

How do I enable file transfer data speed to show during a file transfer? e.g. 100MB/s.

When I copy a file, or move a file, all I see is the transfer box and a green progress bar. There is no data speed rate shown. I recall being able to click "more details", or something akin, in Windows 7 during a file transfer to show the data transfer
rate in real-time. Thanks.

 

Understanding data transfer rates

Greetings - with much trepidation about whatever it is I'm not grasping, I humbly ask for some help here. While 'watching' a large download (a game) on Task Manager and Resource Monitor, I see different data transfer rates in different units. Task Manager may indicate I'm receiving 5.0 Mbps. Resource Monitor then indicates something like 483,000 B/sec of the file of interest, with a few svchost connections receiving up to around 3,000 B/sec (under Processes with Network Activity). If there are 1x10^6 b per Mb, I'm receiving 5x10^6 per Task Manager, but only about 5x10^5 according to Resource Monitor.

Where's the other 90% of whatever is being transferred?