How to copy a large file effectively?

I am copying a small number of large files between a Vista x64 SP1 workstation and a Windows 7 RC workstation. Windows says it will take 7 hours to copy 117GB of data from one computer to another over an uncongested 1 GBit/s switch. Robocopy isn't doing much better.

I seem to remember from my Exchange days, that there were several utilities that claimed to copy very large files between servers. Are these utilities still available and if so, which are most effective in the above situation?

Edit:

I am trying a Robocopy to a USB 2.0 external HDD, as this is all I have available at the moment and it is faster, this is unusual, as the two computers I am using are the only two computers connected to this particular 1GBit/s switch.

Edit 2:

Seems to be some problem with the NIC on the source, can't get the throughput above 3MB/sec after swapping everything else out. As this is the old machine I switched to using the external HDD which copied faster than the NIC, however it still took 3 and a half hours in total.

117GB/7H = 4.6MB/s

Something is wrong here.

Check for disk fragmentation, network misusage, another program grinding the drive or faulty hardware; Windows w/1Gb network can saturate the bandwidth that 7200 SATA drive can provide, i.e. 60-70 MB/s

I might also suggest that you create yourself a nice scheduled task to transfer the file(s) overnight.

For something that large and considering it's a local copy I would either plug the hard drive of one of those PCs into the other and do a direct copy. Alternatively I would use an eSATA hard drive to do the transfer. That's going to be way faster than even GigE.

That all assumes this is a once off, which is how I read your post.

Well, it should take about half an hour to copy that.

Anyway, how long did you wait before canceling it? Did you take a look at the details, to check actual copy speed? Vista's initial estimates are very often way off. After a while it recalculates the speed to give you better estimate.

Here's a tip that says that disabling the network stack's receive-window-auto-tuning may fix your problem. Run As Administrator:

netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

You may also want to consider enabling jumbo frames (9000 bytes MTU) on each system to see if that helps.

I have heard of this happening with a lot of people using vista to copy over the network.

I did a quick google search to verify. There a lot of "fixes" listed here.

This article explains the Vista SP1 file copy improvements and why it works the way it does.