The numbers were all over the place, so lets take a look at why they might be the way they are.įirst and foremost, since we are using mechanical drives and not solid-state storage, seek times and the like come into effect. Your mileage may vary, of course, as there are quite a few variables at play here. Our test wasn’t anywhere near scientific, but we did our best to make sure we could rule out interference while still trying to emulate some real-world use. On the other hand, when copying a large amount of smaller files, TeraCopy seems to have the edge. It seems that copying large individual files works best using Windows 7’s copying ability, at least if speed is what counts.

I did my best for you readers, and ultimately it came down to the copying programs themselves. This minimized the influence of pre-caching before hitting the Start button on each. I also configured TeraCopy and SuperCopier to be the default copiers, and I clocked from the time I hit Ctrl+V.

A clean reboot ensured near-optimal performance for each task. Copying the files in order the same way each time discounted any advantage one program would have had over another by way of caching. External A was a 2 TB internal drive in an enclosure, and external C was a 750 GB store-bought drive. All of the drives I ran this test on were 7200 RPM hard drives and had a cache of 8 MB. Why did I decide to do that? Well, there are quite a few factors to this test, including hard drive speeds. The 24 GB folder was a portion of my music collection, mostly. The 4.4GB file I used was my Wii disc backup of Donkey Kong Country Returns. The external drives were ejected and the system was rebooted between testing each program. This was done in order for each of the copying methods. And lastly, copied that folder from my internal drive to external C. Then, I copied a 24 GB folder (3300 files, with an average size of about 8 MB) from external A to my internal drive, B.

Then, I copied that file to another external hard drive, C.

First, I copied a file of 4.4 GB from one external hard drive, A, to my internal one, B. In order to test fairly, I ran four distinct copy actions with each program and with the default Windows 7 copy function.

Fast copy software windows 10