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Dell Server running 2012 R2 w/ SSD's, Dell workstation running Win 8.1 w/ SSD's.

I wanted to make a copy of a vmhd file so I just did a local copy/paste on the disk where the vmhd file was. When the file transfer graphic looked pretty inconsistent and the copy took a while, I thought I would try a PC to PC copy over my 1Gig network.

The PC to PC copy was significantly faster (more than 3x).

Why is that? All the disks involved are SSD's.

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  • Network devices don't have any persistent storage for data in transit. On top of that, they all use ASICs to move data as fast as possible.
    – Ryan Foley
    Jun 11, 2015 at 21:55
  • Much depends on the sort of filesystem you are using. Also, SSD's are generally fast to read but slow to write. Also depends on filesystem options. You might want to optimize things for SSD. What other processes were also accessing that disk while you were coping the file? Are you using an encrypted or compressed filesystem? That adds overhead, too. You can also do things like turning off indexing for SSDs because there is no penalty for seek with a SSD. Driver options matter. Write caching? If so, write through or write back? There are a lot of variables here.
    – GeorgeB
    Jun 11, 2015 at 22:09
  • I'm using NTFS. No other processes were in operation during the transfer. No encryption or compression. Basic plain Jane defaults. I don't think indexing is on, but I suppose I should check. Upon reflection, could it be that the file to file transfer is overloading the SSD, but in a network transfer, each SSD must only do one operation, either read or write, so they work significantly more efficiently?
    – Alan
    Jun 11, 2015 at 22:52
  • @YLearn Well, I certainly didn't mean to get the wrong community, but the Stack Overflow tags indicated this was the place to come. What community would you suggest for this?
    – Alan
    Jun 12, 2015 at 2:25

1 Answer 1

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Because the SSD only had to do one task (read), instead of two (read and write). If the copy were between two drives on different controllers, it would likely be faster than the network.

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