if I have a 50GB transfer as a bunch of big files and a 50GB transfer as lots of very small files, why is the first one faster in Windows?

Question

I’m moving a bunch of files for some drive changes, and I’ve noticed a bunch of times that for 2 equally sized data transfers, the smaller and more number of files the slower it goes. Why does this happen?

In: 3

Answer 1

Also notice when you check a files properties it’ll say size and then size on disk. There’s a minimum file size the drive is programmed to use, which is the cluster size. Imagine serving dinner and a plate is the minimum/cluster size. If they want 50GB/full plates of rice then it’s going to fill each plate and be faster to move around.

But if 50 people wanted 1 grain of rice, you still have to use a whole plate for 1 rice. So you lose 50 plates for 50 rice. Also that’s 50 different people so it’ll take some time to find them, hand it out, etc.

Very looose analogy. But I have seen a folder with a 100 tiny 1kb files be larger than a 200kb files because of cluster size.