All disk-to-disk copy performance tests were performed using FlexTk Version 1.7.10 on a dual-CPU Xeon machine equipped with 2GB of RAM and running Windows XP SP2. For disk-to-disk copy tests we have used two completely identical Western Digital SATA 250GB hard disks equipped with 16MB of cache. Before each benchmark we have reformatted the destination disk and rebooted the test server.

In order to get a better understanding of how different data sets impact the copy performance, we have used numerous 4GB data sets including a set of 100,000 files 40KB each, a set of 10,000 files 400KB each, a set of 1,000 files 4MB each and a set of 100 files 40MB each. In addition, we have used a 6.1GB real-life data set that included about 150,000 files with 1/3 small files, 1/3 medium-sized files and 1/3 large files.

The performance of built-in Windows tools is identical in all three data sets. The performance of FlexTk is slightly better on huge 4GB files and the difference is getting more significant on 40MB files. This performance difference may be accounted to the DMA-Enabled, double-buffering copy mode employed by FlexTk for large files. Also, it should be noted that during the copy operation both XCopy and RoboCopy have utilized about 25-30% of CPU resources, while FlexTk has used only 5%.

As you can see from the performance results, the copy performance gradually decreases as we are copying smaller and smaller files. On medium-sized files performance dropped to about 40 MB/sec and on small-sized files the copy performance have dropped to 20-30 MB/sec depending on the used copy tool.

Clearly, the FlexTk's copy engine is capable of delivering significantly better performance results when compared to built-in Windows tools such as XCopy and RoboCopy.

* This performance review has been prepared for information purposes only and we are strongly advice you to make your own performance evaluations using your specific hardware components and datasets.