The Frustration

Have you ever wondered why it takes forever to copy a CD worth of files up to the network?  In litigation support, this task happens every day.  But why is it so slow?  There are lots of factors, but some include:

• Anti-virus is checking each file for viruses
• There is a large I/O overhead for reading thousands of individual files
• There is a large I/O overhead for writing thousands of individual files
• CD/DVDs spin a slow speeds, relatively speaking
• Network speeds
• File system inefficiencies (8.3 support, last access support, etc)
• etc

In the end, it tends to be a much longer process than you would think.

Possible Solutions

There are all sorts of things you can try to do to speed up the process.  If you are in litigation support, you are probably tempted to turn off anti-virus for all *.tif files.  You might also seek out the fastest CD/DVD reader on the market.  You can even tweak your file system properties.

All of the techniques work, but I found a trick that can double - if not triple - your speed.  Here’s how you do it:

1. Write the CD to an ISO image.
   • There are lots of tools you can download to do this, but I like ImgBurn for its speed and ease-of-use.
2. Mount the ISO image as a new drive letter.
   • I have had good luck with Virtual CloneDrive.
3. Copy the contents of the mounted ISO to your network location.

Here are the results:

• Time needed to copy 14,000 TIFs from a CD reader: 28:00

• Time needed to create ISO from CD: 4:45
• Time needed to copy 14,000 TIFs from a mounted ISO: 4:00
• Creating and copying from the mounted ISO is x3 faster!!

Why Does It Work?

At the end of the day this trick works because it reduces disk I/O operations. Writing the ISO image is fairly quick because only one file is created and reading from the ISO image requires just a single file handle.  The net I/O savings is pretty huge.

Give it a try and let me know if you have similar results.  I know that I was blown away.