Why is my file copying slowly?

I am trying to duplicate a folder (around 1GB) in the same directory and the copy rate is quite slow (getting around 600kbps).

I can download large files from the Internet faster than that (2/3 MBps).

Any thoughts?

Note: I am using Windows 7 Professional.

Solution 1:

This is normal, you are reading and writing to the same physical disk and it can be even worse if you have a lot of files in a single directory.

Solution 2:

Small files hurt performance. A big file that you download only needs a single file table entry and is only written. But copying 20.000 files; besides reading + writing, also need to modify 20.000 file table entries. And as commented, even the free space table and disk fragmentation also come into play. Your copy dialog seems completely normal to me, I would worry if it mentions hours for a prolonged time...

Solution 3:

if the OS has to call 'CreateFile()' a lot things can get a bit bloody and sometimes nasty. in any case, try to disable the 8.3 filename creation since the "make long names short" is kind of bad for the performance. if you have a lot of similar named files which are pretty pretty pretty similar when truncated to 8.3 then you will trigger the 8.3 algorithm very often:

1. take the long version and truncate it to 8.3 chars
2. is there any other file with that name already?
   1. nope? cool. insert it as an attribute in the MFT
   2. yes? darn, shorten it to 7chars and append a number. check again 2.

if that loop gets repeated often (there is a limit, but it runs several times for each NEW filename coming in) you will notice really bad speed when it comes to move / create a lot of new files.

read more at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247(v=vs.85).aspx#short_vs._long_names

aside from that (just as the other answers already said): explorer has a lot do in the sense of creating icons and holding information about the files for that new directory.