Question:Which is faster, copying everything at once or one thing at a time? ?? ??(7 answers) ?? ???Closed 7 years ago. ?
My boss was saying it takes longer to copy two files at the same time than doing one and then the other because the hard drive has to keep switching the head between the two locations on disk. Is this true? It seems to me that the operating system should be smart enough to fix this (i.e., it should know to copy them sequentially). Is this true when copying to a drive connected to a USB port?
EDIT: are there any other factors regarding the files system that factors in? For example does it make a difference copying 1 directory containing 10 files versus copying 10 files from all over the disk? I’m wondering only about one source medium and one destination medium (no reading from multiple drives).
Answer: I will defer you to this question. It seems that running two copy operations on the same disk concurrently (though started through separate copy operations) would indeed take longer as a result of the latency generated by the head seeking back and forth between the competing operations.
If, however, the copy operations are started simultaneously, the large majority of modern operating systems are as you said smart enough to en-queue the transfers one after the other, and should yield a somewhat quicker copy time.
There are apparently a number of applications available to force the file copy operations to queue and execute sequentially such as Teracopy and FastCopy
Performing concurrent copy operations on multiple physical volumes is another matter entirely, however. As is transferring files through alternate protocols.
Regarding your question about copying to a drive connected to a USB port, it is heavily dependent upon the type of memory that the drive uses and the USB spec being utilized (certainly a noteworthy bottleneck for USB 1.0 and 2.0), as well as the previously mentioned factors regarding the copy source volume.