Slow File Transfer on Windows | Hacker News Reader

Slow File Transfer on Windows

4 pointsanazei5 comments

I have a question.

Windows 10 is really slow at file transfer depending on which media is being used. It's especially slow on network transfers.

I've looked around and there's a bunch of freemium software out there like TeraCopy, which seems to be the most popular consumer software name that keeps popping up all over the internet.

There's also another bare bones Japanese software called FastCopy where it's faster than Teracopy but it gets patched/updated once every 15 years as a use-at-your-risk with no tech support available since it's free but not open source.

I have a question for everyone: if someone came out with a freemium software that could copy files a dozen times faster than TeraCopy or FastCopy, would anyone consider paying for an upgrade to use it at work or for personal use?

Is file copying speed crucial enough to be worth paying for?

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Is file copying speed crucial enough to be worth paying for?

This is just my opinion so it may not be worth noting, but I would personally not pay for anything to speed up file transfers when I can use free software that can create multiple TCP connections for batch file transfers to overcome the round-trip-time and/or slow registry options in Windows.

I would first tune the windows registry to match the expected usage of the network with The SpeedGuide TCP Optimizer [1] This appears to work on Windows 11 even though they do not state it. Then I would just install Cygwin or the Windows Subsystem for Linux and then use the lftp client to do many SFTP threads. The lftp client can even split one massive file into multiple threads. For HTTPS there are download managers like DownThemAll that can speed up downloads provided the website supports Range headers.

[1] - https://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php

Windows has the robocopy command. It is something like rsync, and it's faster than a normal copy. You have to enable multithreading with the /MT:n parameter.

It’s rsync in that it can sync directories in various ways, but AFAIK it doesn’t have its ability to send partial files if the target already has part of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync#Algorithm:

“The rsync utility uses an algorithm invented by Australian computer programmer Andrew Tridgell for efficiently transmitting a structure (such as a file) across a communications link when the receiving computer already has a similar, but not identical, version of the same structure.”

I don't see slow network transfers on Windows 10. I get 112 MB/s to and from my Samba server. That is close to the practical maximum for gigabit ethernet.

> would anyone consider paying for an upgrade to use it at work or for personal use?

No, TeraCopy and windows file transfer are fast enough.

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