Bulk file copy while limiting disk utilization?

Question

I saw that Robocopy can limit network bandwidth in this answer How do you limit the bandwidth for a file copy?

I have plenty of bandwidth on the LAN, but I don't want to saturate the disk on the system originating the copy (Windows 7).

I vaguely remember reading that Win7 has some facilities for disk prioritization and/or throttling. Is there a version of RoboCopy that takes advantage of those OS features?

Or is there a different way to limit the disk impact of a large file copy job?

Answer 1

See this question over at Superuser on the topic of setting I/O priorities for a process. Basically, set the CPU priority of your process to "Idle" to also set the I/O priority to "very low".

There usually is only little value in setting a bandwidth limit for limiting disk I/O since disks are capable of delivering a high sustained throughput on contiguous data but would have great difficulties resulting in high latencies and low throughput with random I/O.