15 Free File Copy Tools Tested, poor Windows 8 performance

[Yogurth]

15 Free File Copy Tools Tested for the Fastest Transfer Speeds

Most of us know that it is possible to copy or move files and folders in Windows by either using your mouse to copy and paste, drag and drop or by using the keyboard. Obviously the single biggest factor affecting the speed of any transfer is what you?re copying from or to such as hard drives, SSD?s, USB sticks, network etc. Another factor is how Windows itself deals with these operations, and all versions of Windows have never been quite as efficient at it as they could be.

With this in mind, it is entirely possible to shorten the duration of any copying or moving of files if you use a piece of third party software to take over operations instead of relying on the Windows built-in function. Not only can this help the speed of transfers, but you can also get other benefits like better information, queuing copies, pausing, skipping, and dealing with problem files far better than what Windows does.

We were curious to find out just how fast some of these programs actually are when copying and moving files around in Windows, so have gathered together 15 freeware tools to have a closer look. A few simple tests were carried out to try and determine which file copying tools are the fastest at performing file transfers in a few different real world scenarios. To try and cover some common file copy operations, 3 tests were conducted;

Test 1: Copies a number of small to medium files from one HDD to another.

4GB totaling 24,185 files / 6193 folders with sizes of a few bytes to 320MB.

Test 2: Copy 2 large files using the same source and destination as test 1.

2x Windows 8 ISO?s (x86 and x64) totaling 5.8GB.

Test 3: Copy over a 10/100 LAN network to the same destination as tests 1 and 2.

450MB totaling 5665 files / 723 folders with sizes of a few bytes to 320MB.

The source drive was a 10,000 RPM WD Raptor and the destination was a standard 7200 RPM SATA drive, both defragged. All the 3rd party software was run using their default transfer settings on Windows 7 64-bit. Each test was run twice and an average of the times was taken.

Full test:

http://www.raymond.cc/blog/12-file-copy-software-tested-for-fastest-transfer-speed/

Interesting and useful article, with one surprising result concerning Windows 8.

[Japlabot]

Look Windows 8 has it's issues, but performance and stability is not one of them. It works fine for most people and it will be more hardware dependant than anything. A few seconds different isn't going to make much difference.

[+virtorio MVC]

Look Windows 8 has it's issues, but performance and stability is not one of them. It works fine for most people and it will be more hardware dependant than anything. A few seconds different isn't going to make much difference.

That doesn't mean their isn't value in looking into alternatives. Explorer has never been the fastest method of copying files.

[+DKAngel Subscriber²]

windows 8 beats windows 7 hands down in transfeers, its much much faster

[Sadelwo]

windows 8 beats windows 7 hands down in transfeers, its much much faster

And the ability to pause different transfers, something I loved about Ubuntu, is pretty neat.

[Avi]

windows 8 beats windows 7 hands down in transfeers, its much much faster

Not on the test machine used in the article, I guess.

[BajiRav]

[cork1958]

Wouldn't use a third party app to transfer files in amillion years. Seems rather redundant, to me. Even if one was much faster than another, a few seconds out of my life isn't going to kill me. I would see a third party program as just another reason to cause an issue, more than anything else.

[LUTZIFER]

I'm quite happy with Windows 7 transfer speed. I move stuff around constantly, usually fairly big downloads, on a regular basis..

Mere seconds to throw half a dozen CDs or more from one drive to another, which I do many times a day,

or half a minute or so for around 25 gigs of vids, so I can't complain.

[ArialBlue]

That is one hella poor designed site

[Evolution]

A test one a single machine hardly proves anything. For all we know the drivers could have had a large impact.... at least he decided to run each test twice.

[Rickkins]

Wouldn't use a third party app to transfer files in amillion years. Seems rather redundant, to me. Even if one was much faster than another, a few seconds out of my life isn't going to kill me. I would see a third party program as just another reason to cause an issue, more than anything else.

Oh good grief....

[Dot Matrix]

Who needs all this third party junk?

[farmeunit]

Wouldn't use a third party app to transfer files in amillion years. Seems rather redundant, to me. Even if one was much faster than another, a few seconds out of my life isn't going to kill me. I would see a third party program as just another reason to cause an issue, more than anything else.

For me it's for resuming and pausing transfers. What happens when you run out of space with Windows? It just fails, and you have no idea where it left off.

[Dot Matrix]

For me it's for resuming and pausing transfers. What happens when you run out of space with Windows? It just fails, and you have no idea where it left off.

That's why I check before starting any file transfers.

[argonite]

Oh goodness. I would never use a third party file copy utility for any claimed improvement on speed. I might use one for features (I use TeraCopy when copying large files to my external, since I can make it do checksum verification).

File copying is a simple operation bottlenecked by hardware. I don't know how you could make it any simpler or faster without compromising some integrity check.

[medhunter]

Fast Copy is a my choice, because I copy a lot through network

[Xoligy]

Before this turns into a debate on why anyone would need a third party app fo copying i prefer terracopy have been using it for a few years now always seems to copy faster imo and has more options than the default windows copy which for me is a win win situation.

[Noir Angel]

Look Windows 8 has it's issues, but performance and stability is not one of them. It works fine for most people and it will be more hardware dependant than anything. A few seconds different isn't going to make much difference.

Not the case. Initially Vista's poor performance in movement of data, both on local disk drives and across a network was one of it's most heavily publicised failings, and despite the fact that it was largely fixed in service packs, the image of Vista never truly recovered from that. Performance does matter to people and if 8 is slower for no good reason people will pick up on it. Personally, having had to go back to 7 because of blue screens on 8 I didn't get enough time to truly test it but the general image that I got was that 8 just feels like it has some polish missing.

[srbeen]

The only reason I would use a 3rd party app is if I needed a log of successful/unsuccessful transfers, which explorer don't do. I find FTP to be very efficient in this regard, and also great at resuming.

As for the article, I would like to know what hardware it was carried out on, besides a terrible WD 10k RPM drive which when I owned one had same spec as my seagate 7200RPM drive (aside from a touch better random seek).

I have a feeling that an XP-designed machine had better written drivers for the hardware than Windows 8 install did.

My real life example should you care: I upgraded from Windows 7 to windows 8, and both were installed on my SSD, it was a literal upgrade from 7, keeping everything in-tact (yay it worked seamlessly!).

In windows 7 I could transfer files from my network around 30MB/s and write around 30-35MB/s from the SSD. With windows 8 I am hitting well over 60MB/s read and 45-50MB/s write to the exact same drive on the exact same system using all the same cabling from the exact same network source... This wasn't a one-time trial, this is average out over a few years of 7 use and months of 8 use.

[ViperAFK]

There is no reason to use third party file copy utilities in windows 8, they've significantly improved the inbuilt file copy functionality so it is no longer lacking in performance/features like it was previously.

[Athlonite]

I've found teracopy to do a much better job than the win7 copy more often than not it spends an age guessing how long it'll take to copy a file before it even starts copying teracopy on the other hand has no such failings I did try extremecopy pro but found when copying large files over the network it would fail halfway through

[Order_66]

I might think windows 8 is a steaming pile but it's pretty clear that the testing is heavily flawed when they said this regarding the slower results for windows 8 "This is explained to a large degree by the Security Essentials antivirus part of Windows Defender scanning every file and slowing everything down"

If you are measuring the performance of multiple operating systems to do the same operation you would naturally want them to be operating as similar to one another as possible, if there's no anti-virus running on 7 and XP then defender should have been disabled for 8.

[StrikedOut]

For me cut/copy and paste is fine. If I am doing large file moves then RoboCopy is perfect.

[Wakers]

Windows 8 is faster when copying and pasting files for me than Windows 7 or teracopy ever was.

It's especially faster when copying multiple large files. And you can pause in Windows 8 now too. No need for third party software and certainly no need to read some half-assed test that is fundamentally flawed.