Results: File Copy Performance With Robocopy
Microsoft's Robocopy, a directory replication command, gradually replaced the older xcopy. It's multi-threaded, has a ton of options, and generally outperforms Windows' vanilla copy operations. Best of all, it's built right in to Redmond's OS. Especially useful for network copy operations and backups, Robocopy doesn't stop to ask you one hundred questions while it copies over your music collection, either.
The reality of benchmarking file copy performance is that you need something fast to move data from and fast hardware to move it to. This is most important with SSDs. It doesn't matter if your drive can write sequentially at 500 MB/s if the source files are hosted on a USB 2.0-attached external hard drive. We're copying our test files from an Intel SSD DC S3700 to the drives in the chart below, taking source speed out of the equation (mostly). Moving to faster storage would increase the faster test disk's ultimate file copy performance. But what's the point? Most users copying data won't have the benefit of a RAID array of PCIe-based SSD, so relying on just one drive as a source gives us a solid average.
There are 9065 files comprising the 16.2 GB payload. Some of them are huge (up to 2 GB), while others are best described as tiny. On average, that's around 1.8 MB per file. The files are a mix of music, program, pictures, and random file types.
It's fair to say that this chart would look much different if we were copying from a hard drive to a SSD. Even if the disk drive's sequential throughput wasn't a bottleneck, it'd still choke on the smaller files.
The near-identical 256 and 512 GB X210s pull up alongside one another, delivering 288 and 287 MB/s, respectively.
