Software To Speed Up File Transfer
Most of us know that it is possible to perform folder and file copy or move operations in Windows by either using your mouse to copy and paste, drag and drop or by using a. Obviously the single biggest factor affecting the speed of any transfer is what medium you’re copying from or to such as hard drives, SSD’s, USB sticks, network etc. Another factor is how Windows itself deals with these operations, and all versions of Windows have never been quite as efficient at it as they could be.With this in mind, it is entirely possible to shorten the duration of any copying or moving of files if you use a piece of third party software to take over operations instead of relying on the Windows built-in function. Not only can this help the speed of transfers, but you can also get other benefits like better information, queuing copies, pausing, skipping, and dealing with problematic files far better than what Windows does. We were curious to find out just how fast some of these programs actually are when copying and moving files around in Windows, so have gathered together 15 freeware tools to have a closer look. A few simple tests were carried out to try and determine which file copying tools are the fastest at performing file transfers in a few different real world scenarios. Which of these (or other) would bypass the Vista/Win7 “slowing filter” (respect to Win XP) for transfers to USB sticks?
“Slowing filter” is only a way to speak, I don’t know if it’s fewer default copying threads, lower default thread(s) priority or what. I’ve got a dual boot Vista XP (so same hardware) and I’m getting 30 MB/s in XP but only 15 MB/s in Vista, big files (1492 MB each) copied from computer’s inner HD (that exceeds 200 MB/s) to an USB stick rated at 60 MB/s writing with USB3, but I’m using USB2 so the XP’s 30 MB/s speeds are correct, but not the 15 MB/s in Vista. I’ve got 3 sticks same brand and model (purchased together) and all get the same speeds in both OS’s and whatever USB port. Absolutely yes. These files are partition images splitted.
3 of the files (1492 x 3 = 4476 MB) fill a DVD+-RW that was my ancient backup system, in short funny but slow, and are below 2GB in case the file system. XP spends about 50 seconds per file, and Vista 1’40”, quite consistently in both cases.
If I have left the computer unattended, I’ve used the file creation dates to see how fast has been the process. Although I cannot tell anything about Win7, I’ve included it in case I point a known problem with known solution (there must be thousands or millions of reports stating Vista/Win7 is a lot slower than XP in file copying through USB, and I’ve tried the suggestion of switching the stick policy from “optimize for quick removal” to “optimize for performance” w/o success, for the case this policy doesn’t matter in XP either, yo do it and the stick is equally fast). If there isn’t solution for this inside the OS I wouldn’t mind install one of these 3rd party copiers. Has anyone done this before for this problem? I’ve tried Robocopy and FastCopy v3.40 in Vista with my fast USB sticks over USB2.
Vista’s Robocopy gets the same speed as Windows Explorer (I’ve tried the version already installed in the OS, that is not the newest one and lacks the option “/MT” for multithreading, the only one that I’ve tried). But FastCopy works:) and gets about 22 MB/s (Explorer 15 MB/s), that is close to what I’m actually getting in XP: not 30 MB/s anymore, but about 24 MB/s with Explorer and 25 MB/s with FastCopy, always with some few 1492 MB files. It’s not the first time I get “brilliant” speeds the first day(s) or Windows session(s) with a storage device but never so fast after that. For instance it happened the same to the RAID 0 array (2x Seagate ST1000DM003 installed in 2013 summer) that serves as main hard disk of this system: it got over 400 MB/s in one or two first proofs (quite logical as these disks can do a bit over 200 MB/s each in their fastest zone) but afterwards about 360 MB/s only, in both Windows Vista and XP.
Over a year ago I was looking for a tool to copy numerous large files files on a scheduled weekly basis (for example: 3,000 files averaging 2.0GB each for a total of 6TB) over a 1Gb network from a SAN to a NAS. I’ve tried most of the top-tier freebies out there (FastCopy, RichCopy, TeraCopy) but none of them perform more efficiently and effectively like good ol’ ROBOCOPY (with the multi-thread switch) batch file and Scheduled Tasks. Here is an example of my CL:robocopy /MT Source Destination FILENAME. /E /MAXAGE:4 /FFT /Z /XA:H /R:100 /W:5 /V /NP /TEE /LOG+:C:BACKUPLOGSDAILYLOG.txtHere are the stats from a recent job (if my math is correct, that is 3.6GB/min)——————————————————————————Total Copied Skipped Mismatch FAILED ExtrasDirs: 2 0 2 0 0 0Files: 121 57 64 0 0 0Bytes: 228.417 g 113.876 g 114.540 g 0 0 0Times: 3:35:28 0:30:45 0:00:00 0:06:24Ended: Sun May 07 10:I’d appreciate any feedback if you have any real-world testing on other faster utilities like those mentioned above.
Wish you made a functional test too, still today programs have issues with funny characters, links, deeply nested folders etc.Make a test folder tree which includes everything, all kinds of characters in various character sets, file symbolic links, directory symbolic links, hard links, directory junctions. Both locally and over the network.Now that would be one very useful test. SEVERAL of the programs listed here will fail to reproduce the original folder tree faithfully! I know from bitter experience. Thanks for this, a great and thorough comparison.I guess all things considered Windows 7’s native copier was my favourite. I always install Teracopy but it freezes so often and crashes out entirely extremely frequently.
But the newer betas and the older stable. I use it as a backup but could never depend on it primarily.I love the look of Windows 8’s copier, but it too also just randomly stop copying a lot. The transfer speed with just slowly reduce to 0 and never error out or resume. Even pausing/unpausing fails.Honestly for any important copy I just use commandline these days. It’s ugly and annoying but using copy, xcopy or robocopy depending on the situation pretty much never fails. I really wish Microsoft would just acquire the teracopy guys and make a clean, more reliable filecopy that don’t hang frequently, and handled deeply nested folders.
Have used TeraCopy for a few years but today it failed with “Out of Memory” on a 260 Gb job. Tried FastCopy and it blitzed it. Still, I do prefer the TeraCopy GUI and its ability to ignore the 255 character limit. I also like the CRC check-sum comparison being displayed during verification.I had a quick look at the developers website.
The blog has progress notes on version 3 (still in alpha). One of its features will be: Unlimited number of files, the internal file list stored on disk instead of memory. So I’m guessing the current version stores the file list in memory and thus eventually just run out of space.Does anyone have any better information regarding TeraCopy failing with “out of memory”? Try another free portable file copier software Exshail CopyCare from below site. Main feature is Preview list of files before copying with seven options below.1.
“Source Target – Copy Files New and changed from Source”2. “Source Target – Copy Files New From Source”3. “Source Target – Copy Files Changed from Source”4. “Target Source – Copy Files Changed from Target”5.
“Target Source Copy Files having Size Difference”6. “Delete Files Orphan from Target”7. “Source = Target – Copy Exact to Target – Overwrite All (Delete Orphans from Target)”sites.google.com/site/exshail/exshailcopycare. Thanks to reviwer for sharing this.Reliability is more imporntant to me.You copied many files very quickly and deleted the original files.But if copied data is broken or loss, what the.Yeah, I got the horrible memories(twice) like that.For 5 years I’ve used Fastcopy, because it can verify the file by MD5 or SHA in one task.(handy)I’ve tested other copy utils.
Not all 15sTerracopy only CRC in copying, after copy job, you can check with MD5(unhandy)SuperCopier seem to be got nothingRichCopy has something but unknownLet’s think about not only speed but also reliablity! It’s the problem, lot of user see ONLY the performance, not the data security. And with Teracopy or Windows copy, you have data lost, lost without any error message if error, no control and error message when error (and the user presume all is ok).
Same with lot of software mentionned here too. Some time, on network cable unplug/hotplug + move, product an error (normal), but when you resume, it destroy the source, and due to not readable source destroy the destination then source and destination are destroyed. Please consider FASTCOPY as I have found FASTCOPY to have NET SPEED AS FAST.
Here’s why:You can tell FASTCOPY to copy and you can walk away. When you come back, you will have the job done. If you use windows and you walk away, when you come back, you may see windows stuck at 1% with a question asking you an innocent question like: Are you sure you want to copy this file? Imagine you trying to copy 100 gigabytes of files and come back in 2 hours and see that message, would you be upset? How about this, after you answer that first question, then, you walk away, thinking”Okay I told windows to copy alreadywindows should not have any question.” Guess what? 2 hours later, I came back and another question was waiting for me.
After answering that second question, I sat there for over 60 minutes and then windows could not copy another file because of longfilename.Then, the whole process was stopped by windows. Talk about being mad.Would you be mad, too? So, I found the answer for us. That’s why FASTCOPY is my favorite software as UN-STOP-ABLE-COPY (like many others). Wait Wait Wait my friends, another bonus, FASTCOPY can also do the MAGIC of UN-STOP-ABLE-DELETE? That’s right.
You want to DELETE 100 gigabytes of files and you want to get the job done without any hiccup? Use FASTCOPY to delete. You can walk away for 2 hours and you are sure when you come back, all files are deleted.
Software To Speed Up File Transfer Usb To Laptop
No question will be waiting for you. The job will be done. That’s genius design. I highly recommend FASTCOPY for NET FAST SPEED for this reason. Please seriously consider my recommendation before you, my friends over the net, waste 5 hours like me in the past. Have a good day and please help othersThank you very much in advance.Most importantly, thank you, Raymond, your articles are always excellent.
At first it looked like FastCopy was doing a great Job but after 2850 seconds it shows major drawbacks in performance, my bet is the verify option!Up until now FastCopy archived 80mb/s (diff hdd setting) then it stopped because md5sum was slower than copied files (assumption: md5sum in FastCopy is not multithreaded).Ever since the copy process stopped once it won’t get faster than 50mb/s – Which kinda sux!TotalRead 134215.2mbTotalWrite 134093.5mbTransRate (current): 42mb/sAmount of Data to be copied 917GB!I say Win7 x64 copy is faster than that! @Thomas TI use Teracopy and FastCopy. They both seem stable to me.FastCopy lives up to it’s name and is faster, but can not (to the best of my knowledge) be set as Windows Default File Handler while TeraCopy can.If I want the extra speed I can choose to use FastCopy, but mostly I’m lazy (ctrl+c, ctrl+v) and use TeraCopy.Although, there is one thing I do always use FastCopy for, and that is syncing a USB Memory Stick to it’s backup folder on my computer.
FastCopy has “Sync” as a copy method option and it is a very fast (from my very limited testing) way of updating the backup.Another nice thing about FastCopy is that you can use it via batch files:-)and while I’m in a curious mood, a not so quick comparison of speed – Teracopy and FastCopy vs a large folder with.MANY. files (my PortableApps folder:-)XP3, copying a 1.91GB folder with 35,903 files – from one external Hard Drive to another. Way to many programs running in the background. Computer is old enough that it might even be via USB1.1 connections:-oTeracopy 2.27: 26.05 minutesFastCopy 2.11: 17.33 minutesWindows XP: I’m not even going to try that:-p.