Is there a faster way to copy a file other than File.Copy

Question

It takes about 2 minutes to do a File.Copy(src, dest); for a 1.6GB File from Folder A to Folder B on the same drive. Is there a faster way to do this in C#/.NET in code (w/o hardware) - Something with stream, threading etc?

Would a filestream be quicker? How about a class that chunks up the file using a threadpool, and reads a range of bytes/writes a range of bytes [that sounds like a great way to corrupt the file, but integrity is not priority 1 here, its speed :-)]

I have searched but everyone says use File.Copy, but it's slow (as slow as Windows Copy) - I would prefer not to use a 3rd party tool.

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Here are some answers to some of the questions:

Copy time comparison:

> C# : 2.15m  
> Windows Explorer: 2.53m  
> TeraCopy: 2.26m
> FastCopy: 2.24m

Ok, those are not averages and I know they may change slightly on subsequent runs, but I really thought there would be a faster way to copy a file since I assumed that Windows was doing additional security and integrity checks :-(

I'm still hoping for some good answer (like 'oh yea, files over 1.5GB will be x faster if you do buffer m and turn off security n') -- ok, I'm just wishing at this point.

Answer 1

If you are interested in creating a symbolic or hardlink instead of an actual copy then the following Windows APIs might be helpful.

• CreateHardLink
• CreateSymbolicLink

Answer 2

You could try to use the hardware already at your disposal, and allocate a large buffer in memory. By reading and writing in larger chunks you might be able to remove some of the overhead.

However, there isn't much overhead to get rid of, the bottle neck is still the disk I/O. I would expect at best something like a 5% reduction in execution time.