Not an IT pro. I work at IHOP but here is what I would look for:
- Target drive should always be at least the same size or larger than the source drive
- I would make sure both drives are using the same file system and allocation unit (cluster) size which is picked during formatting
- Drive types and specs
Condition of the current operating system and the drives in question are the most important factors followed by the integrity of the data being copied/moved.
Tidbit on Allocation Unit Size: Default NTFS AUS on Windows is 4,096 bytes (4KB)
This is something most everyone leaves at default and for drive that will be storing various sized files, that might seem like a safe selection but if you will be copying/moving/deleting/creating mostly large to huge files, meaning each file can be 100MB or larger than you should select a larger AUS, like 16KB or higher. If the drive will have a few large files but most of the files will be smaller than a few MBs in sizes then you could go with a smaller AUS like 2KB or even 1KB.
Larger the files, larger the AUS for better performance and also less fragmentation. Same goes for smaller files and smaller AUS. Worst case is when you have predominantly large files and use very small AUS or vice versa.
Imagine storing video files or hi res images, smallest files size is like 5MB and most are like 20+ MBs and some DVD files are actually a gig or more. To store this files, file system will break each file into much smaller pieces to store them. Consider AUS size is the size of each one of those pieces. Now imagine formating the drive and selecting the default AUS of 4KB. File system will have to chop each large file into 4KB chunks. When it is looking (seek), reading and writing, it will have to scan that many clusters to complete a 100MB file but if you selected 16KB as your AUS, the performance will be 3x-4x faster which will be very noticeable with large files but probably not so much with smaller files.
In a nutshell, here is my table to give you a simpler overlook of AUS variables as an equation:
Large AUS + mostly large files:
- Pros = Very good performance, much less drive fragmentation
- Cons = None
Large AUS + mostly smallish files:
- Pros = Slightly better performance, a little less drive fragmentation
- Cons = Wasted/less usable space (Example: AUS is 16KB and files that are smaller than 16KB will still be using at least 16KB space
Small AUS + mostly large files:
- Pros = Slightly more usable space and less wasted space (if at all)
- Cons = Slow performance across the board, way more fragmentation, more read-write errors
Small AUS + most small files:
- Pros = Decent performance
- Cons = Average to slightly more fragmentation
Above info is definitely more applicable to drives with magnetic disks as opposed to Solid State Drives, especially the fragmentation situation. For SSDs and USB Flash drives, the effects on performance is a much more pronounced.
If you are copying a lot of files, regardless of their size and concerned with errors, etc. take a look at
TeraCopy
It is very fast and offer error recovery option along with pausing the process, etc.
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