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file transfer - Which is faster, copying everything at once or one thing at a time?


I am transferring a bunch (20+) of large (1GB+) files to my external flash drive over USB 2.0. Is it quicker to just sling them all over at once (as in one at a time but not waiting for the previous transfer to finish) so that there are multiple transfers going on, or transfer one, wait for it to finish, transfer the next. The files are coming from a variety of locations so I can't do one single big transfer.


Are there any other advantages to one way or the other that are worth considering?



Answer



If they are all coming from different physical disks, but being written to a solid state drive (flash, SSD) then you can copy them simultaneously.


The physical head movement (latency) is what will slow a transfer from a spinning platter disk. If you were copying from a single HDD, then you would start a single big transfer rather than lots of small ones. The head going back and forth between two or more files that are being copied is what slows the transfer. Of course you would get the same effect if the HDD were heavily fragmented even if you were copying a single file.


If it was between solid state drives, then it would not matter.


If you don't want to wait around for each transfer to finish then use a copy queuing app like Teracopy.


Of course the flash drive write speed would be the bottleneck here, so it probably doesn't matter which way you do it. :)


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