Windows – Why is transferring large local files in PowerShell so slow for me

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I am currently using PowerShell's Copy-Item commandlet to create a copy of a 500GB file and transferring it to another local hard drive on the computer. Doing it this way is really slow: a couple hours for it to finish. When I simply right-click the file, select copy, and paste, the transfer takes about an hour. Is there another PowerShell cmdlet to use to get faster transfer time?

EDIT:
Powershell commandlet iam currently using Copy-Item -Path G:\Backups -Destination I:\Backups -Force -Recurse

Best Answer

Is there another PowerShell cmdlet to use to get faster transfer time?

It's slow because it is using buffered I/O. If you want performance parity use a native Windows command such as XCOPY or RoboCopy and use unbuffered I/O.

Related Solutions

Windows PowerShell – How to Diff Two Text Files

Figured it out myself. Because Powershell works with .net objects rather than text, you need to use get-content to expose the contents of the text files. So to perform what I was trying to do in the question, use:

compare-object (get-content one.txt) (get-content two.txt)

Windows – Which is Faster: Transferring Several Small Files or Few Large Files?

It is faster to transfer a single large file instead of lots of little files because of the overhead of negotiating the transfer. The negotiation is done for each file, so transferring a single file it needs to be done once, transferring n files means it needs to be done n times.

You will save yourself a lot of time if you zip first before the transfer.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Windows PowerShell – How to Diff Two Text Files

Windows – Which is Faster: Transferring Several Small Files or Few Large Files?

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