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Do any of the programs that purport to copy files faster than the built-in Windows Explorer file copying, really do what they claim to do? I am thinking of using ExtremeCopy and am wondering if it will really make a difference to my copying times.

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Maaan, anything's faster than Windows copy. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Mar 27 '11 at 3:52
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You might want to look into TeraCopy - it's fast, supports queued copying (which should be your primary motivation for replacing the Explorer Shell's copying mechanism), and does have a free version. – Breakthrough Jul 8 '11 at 13:26
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Hands down the BEST large file copying utility in Windows is ESEUtil. Use the /Y switch. More info on the Technet blog here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2007/05/08/slow-large-file-copy-issues.aspx

Here are a few of the faster-than-Explorer copying methods to try (command-line based unless noted), somewhat in order of speed from slower to faster

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Now if anyone has any tools that make copying ~3,000,000 10k files a bit faster, I'm all ears; All of the above are equally suck for millions of tiny files as far as I can tell. – Hyppy Mar 27 '11 at 4:53
There's also XXCOPY, which has tons of switches, and RichCopy, from Microsoft, which can copy using simultaneous threads. It's GUI and command line based. You can use the GUI to get the multitude of switches you may want to use and copy it from one of the windows. – paradroid Mar 27 '11 at 7:09
If you've got a 64bit computer and windows 7 you can run robocopy 64bit which is multithreaded and apparently insanely fast. – music2myear Jul 8 '11 at 14:31
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up vote 2 down vote

I don't know about that one but one that does indeed work faster depending on what you are copying and has stop/resume support is TeraCopy:

TeraCopy is designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed. It skips bad files during the copying process, and then displays them at the end of the transfer so that you can see which ones need attention. TeraCopy can automatically check the copied files for errors by calculating their CRC checksum values. It also provides a lot more information about the files being copied than its Windows counterpart. TeraCopy integrates with Windows Explorer's right-click menu and can be set as the default copy handler.

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There's a handful of tools that claim to copy faster than built in windows copy - i was about to name teracopy , but in this case, i'll take richcopy as an example.

Threading is one way to speed up file copies - in short rather than transferring files one by one, you can transfer multiple files at once.

The other is the option to not transfer files that are identical.

I also believe the method of buffering files, pre copy makes a difference in copy speed.

So, since microsoft themselves make a better copying tool than standard windows copy and xcopy, it is possible. I can't comment on the specific example tho

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Threading does not help unless you are copying multiple source files spread out over multiple physical drives to multiple destinations that are also on different drives. If all of the source files are on the same drive, then trying to read and write multiple things at the same time slows it down since the drive has to constantly seek back and forth. – psusi Mar 21 at 18:11
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