Copy large amount of small files using robocopy from USB disk to SATA disk

multi-threadingrobocopyusb

Would specifying the /MT option in robocopy give me better or worse performance, when copying a large amount of smaller files (~10-150kB) from an USB attached drive to an internal SATA drive? Should I go all crazy and specify /MT:128?

Both drives are regular 5400k spinning hard disks.

Best Answer

In this case, I would predict worse. You want to minimize contention for IO if the limiting factor is seek/local access times. Since you are not traversing a network, that will probably be the case. (Unless you have a SSD as the source.)

Of course, test it out, but I would be surprised if you got noticeably better performance. Let us know what you find.