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Use Case: Copying 10-30GB movie files. Best settings?

Posted: Tue May 02, 2017 5:28 pm
by jkauff
My most common use case is copying movies between drives. Some are SSD-to-HDD, some from HDD-to-HDD. The relevant HDDs are all cached.

I currently have a 4GB Level 1 and a 25GB Level 2 on my secondary SSD. The copy speed seems to diminish about a third of the way through the transfer, so I'm wondering if I need a larger Level 2 or more memory for my Level 1. Or something entirely different. BTW, I'm usually copying to the main drive, then immediately copying the same file to a backup drive.

Any insights?

Re: Use Case: Copying 10-30GB movie files. Best settings?

Posted: Fri May 12, 2017 6:25 pm
by InquiringMind
Welcome to the forums Jkauff,

PrimoCache (and caching generally) can't offer any benefit for once-off file copies - yes, they may appear to offer an initial boost (as data goes to L1/L2 cache to begin with) but that is then lost when the data is flushed from the cache to the destination drive.

Only with multiple copies of the same data, are you going to see any benefit from caching. In your case, it may actually make more sense to disable caching on your backup drive (to avoid filling the cache with data that won't be reused) and instead look at file copying tools to get the job done faster (see Raymond.cc: 15 Free File Copy Tools Tested for the Fastest Transfer Speeds for some options).