This is more likely to be your network and the amount of data moved as well as your client. Are you using Tortoise? I find it to be a bit slow myself when moving that much data!
Are you using TortoiseSVN? If so, the Icon Overlays do slow down operations. If you go to TortoiseSVN Settings/Icon Overlays there are several settings you can tweak to control the level to which you want to use the Overlays, including turning them off completely. See if that affects your performance.
Do you need every bit of the repository on your working copy? If you truly only care about particular portions of the tree, look into Subversion's Sparse Directories (a.k.a. "Sparse Checkouts") feature. It allows you to manipulate your working copy so it only contains those directories of interest.
Just as an example, you might use this to prune documentation, installer-related files, etc. Depending on what you truly need on your local machine, embracing this approach could make a serious dent in your wait times.
Do you run a virus checker that uses on-access scanning? That can really make it crawl. If so, turn it off and see if that helps. Most scanners will have a way to exclude specific directories if that helps.
I experience exatly the same thing. Recently replaced Perforce with svn, but if we cannot overcome the performance problems on Windows me must consider another tool. Using svn 1.6.6, Win XP and Vista clients. RedHat server. My observations matches yours: - Huge disk-write activity. - Antivirus not a bottleneck. - No matter witch svn-clients are used. - No server or network bottleneck. Complementary info More than 3 times faster operations on: - Linux (Ubuntu). - Linux (Ubuntu) running on VirtualBox at Win Vista host. - Win XP running on VMWare at RedHat host.
Nobody seems to be pointing out the one reason that I often consider a design flaw. Subversion creates a second "pristine" copy of the checkout for offline operations. If you're checking out 4G of files, it's actually writing 8G to disk.
Compare a checkout to an export. That will show you the massive difference when writing those second copies.
There's nothing you can do about that.
Try svn client version 1.5.. It helped me on my Vista laptop. Versions 1.6. are extremely slow.