Unrealistically high file transfer speeds in Windows 11?

[Brandon_Byrnes]

This isn’t so much a tech support question as just something I’m wondering about. I’ve noticed that when I’m transferring a file from a Gen 4 M.2 NVME drive to my mechanical HDD windows 11 will sometimes show a ridiculous transfer speed like 1.2gb/s which is impossible when transferring a file to a mechanical HDD. I do alot of file transfers between drives and I have M.2 NVMEs, SSDs and HDDs in my system. I’ve also noticed this when transferring files from an SSD to a HDD where it will say something like 700mb/s. I also use Teracopy for transferring files and it also sometimes does this. This makes me afraid to delete a file right after copying it to another drive for fear that even though windows says it’s done transferring it might actually NOT be done transferring. Is there anything I should worry about when it comes to deleting files right after copying when windows gives these unrealistic transfer speeds?

[Bruce]

You are right to be suspicious, it has always been that you should click the safely remove hardware option for USB devices for the reason things are not written to the device directly (unless Enable write caching has been disabled), they are buffered in cache and written when the buffer is full.
So ejecting too soon after a transfer is no guarantee the data has been physically transferred yet.

If the drives in question are not external, maybe you should go to Device Manager and for each drive, disable the write cache feature.

[Brandon_Byrnes]

hey Bruce. I’ve noticed it mainly on my big internal HDD. For example even with write-caching off (which i just disabled) I copied 4.18GB of video files to it from an internal gen 3 M.2 NVME drive and in TeraCopy the transfer took about 4 seconds and it said it transferred at 3gb/s. I know this is an absolutely impossible write speed for a HDD. My question is though, since I know in Windows when you delete a file it doesn’t actually delete it, If i do delete the files i transferred right after the transfer is there a chance those files could be corrupted on the target drive or since the file isn’t actually deleted, just hanging out in the recycle bin do i not have to really worry?

[Bruce]

While I can’t say with certainty, I would not be overly concerned.
Windows caches a lot of stuff and gets it done eventually, even if the copy physically is still in progress but seems done, then you deleted that file you just transferred, it’ll get queued and done in due course.

I can’t figure why you are getting those super high transfer speed though.
Let’s see if anything pops out if you do a complete rundown of your system.
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[Bruce]

@Brandon Byrnes - any update?

[Bruce]

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