13
4
Windows Copying is a real mess ever since Windows Vista. Even Microsoft claims they've improved the performance, from a user perspective, it's not quite visible. Even with single file the copying window appears too much time for 'Calculating' and then finishing the copy(Even after 100% completion some times the dialog remains active).
At the same time, I was backing up some files in Ubuntu Linux. I felt it's really fast. Might be a feeling caused by faster UI updates.
I read an informative post from Jeff Atwood few years back on Windows File Copying. but what my specific questions are
- Is (Ubuntu) Linux file performance is better than Windows-7?
- Are both algorithms, Windows and Linux is making use of multiple threads and pipelining mechanism to improve the speed? If yes, which one is better?
It should be noted (albeit 8 years later!) that Robocopy /CREATE, although very useful to replicate a complete directory structure with empty files, does not by itself prevent fragmentation of files on the target. The structure is created in the MFT, but then the files' contents can be recorded anywhere. Normally even in one pass if Robocopy is running mono-threaded and copies one file at a time, there should be no fragmentation anyway (and running it multi-threaded is a bad idea as it severely reduces the performance on a HDD to HDD copy, since the mechanical drive has to “grind” a lot more). – GabrielB – 2019-05-26T02:15:26.383
3In Windows use
xcopy
, or evenrobocopy
. Much better. For example, with the latter you can make two passes, first to create all the directories but not copy any files, and second to copy the actual files, thus causing no fragmentation on the target. – Kerrek SB – 2011-06-27T10:19:37.3631
Or RichCopy (http://blogs.technet.com/b/ken/ and download)
– sehe – 2011-06-27T13:04:07.940Depends also on the filesystem - your system presumably using something like
ext3/4
, which is competing with NTFS here. You might also tryreiserfs
andxfs
- both of which are optimized for fast operations with small files. – new123456 – 2011-06-27T15:29:48.867@KerrekSB, please make your comment an answer so I can upvote it. (I did just +1 the comment, but you know what I mean.) That's the answer. – CarlF – 2011-06-27T16:52:36.827