Resolved Windows 7 moves files at different speed, slow!

My network drive ran out of space and I am moving the contents to another network drive. The PC and two network drives are connected to the same Gigabit Ethernet. The PC is a Core 2 Duo machine running Windows 7 x86 with 4GB (effective <3 GB) and Task Manager shows 50% memory used. The router is Belkin Play Max. PC's wireless-N is on and connected to the Belkin modem router at 300 Mbps.

Here's what happening:

1. Moving a folder X from drive A to drive B. It happens to be about 2 MB/s. CPUs with 2 cores stay around 2%-5% usage. Ethernet was using mostly less than 5%. WiFi shows less than 1% usage, and for 2 and 3 below.

2. Start another set of windows and moving another folder Y from drive A to drive B. The speed is about 8 MB/s. CPUs stay around 2%-15%. Ethernet was using mostly less than 5%, and between 0% to 30%.

3. Start the 3rd set of windows and moving another folder Z from drive A to drive B. This time the speed was about 500 KB/s. CPUs stay around 2% - 20%. Ethernet was using mostly less than 5% and between 0% to 25%.

After a while, folder Z finished moving. CPU stay around 2%-15%. Folder X and Y remain their same transfer rate, i.e. 2 MB/s and 8 MB/s. Ethernet was using less than 5% and between 0% to 20%.

My questions are:
Q1: Why are there a difference in transfer rate?
Q2: Why are the transfer rates not increased when the Ethernet was using only less than 20%?
Q3: How to get the maximum speed to move all files from drive A to drive B? Using multiple moves, or single move? Using utility? Which utility?

 

you could try a little program called terra copy it's free and does a much better job than the windows copy/move function which seems to get bogged down for no reason sometimes

another reason could be file sizes smaller file writes can sometimes be quite slow as the HDD never gets a chance to fully utilize the maximum bandwidth in comparison to say a 1GB file

 

It was the problem of the HP notebook used. It's 32-bit Windows 7 and the Gigabit Ethernet was extremely slow, at around 60-150 KB/second. Reason unknown to me. I rebooted everything together but it didn't help.

After I swapped the HP notebook with an even 2 years older Asus notebook, still Core 2 Duo but 64-bit Windows 7, the Gigabit Ethernet gave 1.5 MB/second throughput, i.e. 10 times faster, though the bandwidth

It's now considered normal and tolerable. Thanks guys.