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?
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Imagine a delivery driver who is delivering items to a house, but they can only deliver one item at a time
It’s much faster to deliver a single 10kg item than It is to deliver 10 1kg items individually.
The driver has to go back to the truck, collect the next item, deliver to the door etc .
Your computer has to do finish the transfer, verify it copied and then find the next file and do the same.
If over the network, there’s also a small loss of efficiency with lots of smaller files. A standard packet is 64kb in size, so you can send 1 64kb file in a single packet or if you want to send 8 8kb files, each needs its own packet which adds time and overhead (correct me if am wrong)
It might be easier to compress a bunch of smaller files into a zip file, copy it and then unzip
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