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

The operating system of a computer needs to know where on the hard drive the data are stored. It uses a kind of index to write it down. The index says basically that file A is stored in row 3, segment 4 (it’s more difficult but let’s keep it that way). Doing so with only one big file is of course faster than with hundreds of small files that are together as big as the one file.