Would specifying the /MT option in robocopy give me better or worse performance, when copying a large amount of smaller files (~10-150kB) from an USB attached drive to an internal SATA drive? Should I go all crazy and specify /MT:128?
Both drives are regular 5400k spinning hard disks.
In this case, I would predict worse. You want to minimize contention for IO if the limiting factor is seek/local access times. Since you are not traversing a network, that will probably be the case. (Unless you have a SSD as the source.)
Of course, test it out, but I would be surprised if you got noticeably better performance. Let us know what you find.
Unfortunatelly it totally depends. After a little testing I found out that the most important differentiator is the Operating System used to start the copy.
On XP/2003 the throughput went from okayish to horrible, at least on the setup I tested.
On a 2008 R2 the throughput went from okay to way faster, when I used the /MT:128. It seems as if the OS is smarter in planning disk access...
For me the copying was a one-time thing, so I won't investiagate any further. But the findings strongly suggest that there unfortunatelly is no general answer to that question.