Results: Robocopy File Copy Performance
File Copy Performance with Microsoft Robocopy
Microsoft's Robocopy, a CLI directory replication command, gradually replaced the older xcopy. It rocks a whole host of features that make it the logical choice for transferring a large number of files. It's multi-threaded, has a ton of options, and generally outperforms vanilla Windows copy operations. Best of all, it's built right in to Redmond's operating system. 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 copy from and something fast to copy 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.
There are 9065 files comprising the 16.2 GB payload. Some of the files 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.
Samsung's 840 EVOs don't quite show up where we were expecting. The 500 GB model comes close to the 128 GB 840 Pro, while the 1 TB model squares up against SanDisk's 120 GB Extreme II. You'd think that write caching via Turbo Write would excel, especially the biggest model and its 12 GB of simulated SLC memory. For comparison, the 120 GB model is just slightly faster than the 64 GB Ultra Plus from SanDisk. Meanwhile, the 250 GB drive is just three seconds ahead of the 128 GB Ultra Plus.