I noticed that if I transfer a few large files between two hard drives, it's pretty speedy, at around at least 30 MB per second, but if I transfer thousands of files less than 5 KB, it is pretty damn too slow.. around 1 to 2 MB per second.
Is there a way to speed up the copy/paste process with thousands of small files on Windows 7?
You might want to take a look at TeraCopy which is a program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed by dynamically adjusting buffers to reduce seek times. TeraCopy can also do asynchronous copying which speeds up file transfer between two physical hard drives.
I have personally used this application and have found that it does speed up file transfers which usually would take some period of time to accomplish.
Hope this helps some.
The solution is to archive with WinRAR, but, when asked how to archive, choose store. This means that there will be no compression. Thus in approximately one minute you will end up with one large file to copy, which will copy very fast.
I tried to copy 19890 small files (5K or so each) and Windows told me that it would take 3 hours, TeraCopy said 3.2 hours, but with my method it only took 1.5 minutes.
ZIP the files and then transfer the larger ZIP file? I don't know how long it would take to ZIP though (and if the total time is faster).
It's possible that part of what is slowing you down for many small files is if they are not in the same physical area of the disk. On a drive which is not very fragmented, a single large file will mostly all be read from one place, but if you have to read a bunch of separate files, they may be scattered across the disk.
ZIPing was the first idea that came to mind for me as well, but as pointed out above, you'd lose time to that process anyhow. I have noticed that in general, copying with RoboCopy.exe goes faster than doing it through the GUI. You might want to play around with that and see how it works for you.
ZIP has a 4 GB file limit (or something like that) - I usually use RAR archiver (it doesn't have that file size limit) and specify to not compress at all - this way archiving into a single file happens very fast, and then I simply copy that big file.
Seems to be lots of indeterminate answers here, so I'll add a datapoint.
For me it was significantly faster to zip (using store-only compression) and then transfer the zip. Significantly.
It might be worth trying a quick defrag before ZIPing anything, but this is only really if you will be moving lots of small files, very often. If not then I suggest just zipping it (with 7zip or something - which will often compress better than just Windows standard compression) and then copy across.
And it also depends on the harddrives. Is this a USB external hard drive or 2 that are in the same system? If it's an old external hard drive it may be using USB1.0 or you may be better off having one with a power supply.
On Windows 11, just was trying to solve same issue (!). Total commander helped me a lot, since it's much faster.
If its a unix based system you can use tar over ssh.
-The following command compresses all files and folders.
tar -cf - /home | ssh root@192.168.1.1 tar -xvf - -C /
-Transfer it and decompress it at the second computer.
This is much faster than copying only per scp
First read the man page and BE CAREFUL
