What is the fastest way to mirror a directory tree on a DVD to a local hard disk in Windows 7

Recently I had DVD with a folder that contained over 83,000 files and folders. When I went to mirror this folder onto a local harddrive with ROBOCOPY I quickly discovered that more than an hour had past and only 20% of the files had been copies.

Next I thought of something faster but still not fast: I made an ISO image file of the DVD and then using WinRAR opened up the ISO and extracted the directory to the destination. That turned out to take some 20 minutes which for a folder of less than 1GB in size seemed extraordinarily long wait.

Does anyone know of a way to just "DUMP" the directory onto the HD to maximize the copy speed?

David Lundquist

Posted 2011-12-14T22:57:35.913

Reputation: 21

1Doesn't really depend on the type of drive and the type of CDROM your using? Is the CDROM SATA or is it the slower IDE? Your hard drive should be able to handle 30-50MB/s so the CDROM is probably the bottleneck. – djangofan – 2011-12-14T23:06:49.657

Was it 20 minutes for the whole operation or just the ISO rip? If the whole operation, is the ripping or the extracting that took time? – mtone – 2011-12-14T23:42:57.130

Answers

The way you are doing it is the fastest I would think. Though if you have a second hard disk, then put the iso on a different disk to the destination of the files.

That way you avoid contention between reading the files and writing the files on the same hard disk.

You might want to try daemon-tools to mount the ISO as a "disk" rather than using WinRAR which may be more efficient, but you would still want to locate the ISO on a different disk than the destination to avoid contention.

Paul

Posted 2011-12-14T22:57:35.913

Reputation: 52 173

I agree with Paul that what you are doing with the ISO should be the fastest, but have you tried copying the disc using the command prompt? On XP at least, that used to be a little faster than the GUI for large amounts of files (I think because of the attempt to estimate the transfer time with the GUI). – Trav – 2011-12-14T23:32:29.490

I use FastCopy to handle my large copy/move jobs, especially if it involves lots of tiny files. Just seems to work faster and more efficiently than the Windows built-in copy and even other 3rd party programs like Teracopy.

Leftium

Posted 2011-12-14T22:57:35.913

Reputation: 8 163