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Samsung magician reports these characteristics for my NTFS-formatted SSD:

SSD

When I copy a large file in explorer, Windows reports around 200 MB/s:

11GB file copy

But copying a large folder of many small files can be up to three orders of magnitude slower:

Folder of icons copy

Is this the best I can expect or are there ways to speed it up?

EDIT:

  1. Zipping the files will not make the copy significantly faster since the system still has to read all the files on zipping and then write them on unziping, while adding another overhead and making a common operation less convenient.

  2. I am aware that command line copying is faster, and it what I do when I need to copy a very large amount of data, but dropping to a command line to save several seconds is probably not worth it.

  3. TeraCopy was a somewhat faster than a native drag-and-drop, clocking in at 53 seconds vs. 68.

  4. I guess the answer is "no, you can't make explorer file operations faster but you can use other options when needed", which is what I suspected but wanted to make sure there was nothing specific to my system making it uncharacteristically slow. Thank you for all your comments.

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  • Zip it first. NTFS is just glacially slow with many small files. Just look at how long it takes to do such a simple task as install or remove an app, which is really little more than a file copy.
    – Tetsujin
    Jul 4, 2020 at 16:36
  • Could be your security software slowing down the read and writing, Jul 4, 2020 at 19:11
  • 1
    Explorer is a Namespace Browser and not a file manager. Explorer has no idea what a file is, just folder objects and folder items. A folder is an abstract term and is not a directory (eg Control Panel, My Computer, Shares, Network, One Drive, etc). Each folder object is responsible for any operations in that folder. Explorer asks the folder to copy itself or it's items. The object knows what it is, even if explorer doesn't, and knows how to copy it's items. So there is a lot of abstraction going on. When you go into a file folder this CLSID is loaded {F3364BA0-65B9-11CE-A9BA-00AA004AE837}
    – Mark
    Jul 4, 2020 at 20:12
  • 1
    See docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/namespace-intro. The answer is use CMD if speed is so important. Add the Registry to the namespace (shellboost.com/Doc/Samples/Registry-Folder-sample).
    – Mark
    Jul 4, 2020 at 20:21

2 Answers 2

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You can use TeraCopy for copying a bunch of files faster. I also use it for fast copy/paste operations. Even you can also compress the files using zip format. But I recommend 7z files (using 7-zip) for a balance between compression ratio and speed.

2

Probably not an answer you're looking for, but still ...

If you're fond of command line, you can use robocopy on windows. It's much faster.

In general, you'll get more performance out of your disk when using larger allocation unit sizes (64K instead of 4K for example) for larger files. While OS disks are okay with 4K allocation size, a disk for videos/media/games can benefit a lot from a bigger allocation unit size. Keep in mind that this will increase the disk space used, particularly if you have a lot of small files on the disk as well.

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