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?
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.ext3/4
, which is competing with NTFS here. You might also tryreiserfs
andxfs
- both of which are optimized for fast operations with small files.