Demartek Presents Robocopy at March 2011 RMWTUG Meeting

16 February 2011

Dennis Martin, President of Demartek, will speak at the March 2011 Rocky Mountain Windows Technology User Group (RMWTUG)meeting. This meeting will be held at the Demartek Lab in Arvada, Colorado on March 22, 2011.

Agenda

7:00-7:15pm — Networking
7:15-8:00pm — Microsoft Lync Technical Overview
8:00-8:15pm — Break
8:15-9:00pm — Lab Tour and Robocopy Multithread Presentation

Pizza and drinks will be provided.

23 March 2011

Robocopy (“robust file copy”), included with Windows operating systems, is a rich file copy utility with many options. Note that the syntax for Robocopy is different than the COPY or XCOPY commands. To get started with robocopy, open a command prompt and enter: robocopy.

For this presentation we compared the results with and without the multithread option: robocopy /MT. Using multithreaded robocopy in most cases results in faster or significantly faster file copy operations than without the multithread option. The multithread option was introduced in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. When using the multithread option, the thread count can be 1 – 128, with a default of 8 threads. Robocopy takes advantage of Server Message Block (SMB) version 2.1, a file and print services network protocol, also sometimes known as CIFS. For additional detail on SMB 2.1 see: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff625695(WS.10).aspx.

For the tests shown in the presentation, we used two relatively new servers running Windows Server 2008 R2 and did local disk-to-disk (array) copies and copies across the network, using 1GbE and 10GbE infrastructure. We used three sets of files in these robocopy tests:

Website folder of 38.7 GB, 1.5 million files
ISO file folder of 59.2 GB, 215 files
Video folder of 218.9 GB, 1 file

View the March 2011 RMWTUG Robocopy Multithread presentation (331KB, PDF), which includes the test descriptions, hardware configurations and results graphs showing bytes/sec and time to completion.

Look for more detailed test results to follow in an upcoming Demartek Robocopy Multithread report.

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