December 6, 2025
Click-to-copy vs. nerd scripts: FIGHT!
Copy-Item is 27% slower than File Explorer
Windows Copy Showdown: Click-to-copy wins, scripts stumble
TLDR: File Explorer beat PowerShell’s Copy‑Item by 27% in a real‑world test, while some built‑in tools crawled. Commenters clashed: some say Windows file copying is just flaky, others say the setup is at fault, sparking jokes about PowerShell quirks and progress bars secretly slowing everything down.
A homelab hero timed Windows copy methods and lit a fuse: File Explorer’s drag‑and‑drop hit about 112 MB/s, PowerShell’s Copy‑Item limped at 82 MB/s, built‑in SFTP (the encrypted file method) did ~70 MB/s, robocopy face‑planted at 25 MB/s, and WSL’s rsync crawled at 13 MB/s. Cue the chorus. The top‑liked mood? Pure snark. “Never assume anything done in PowerShell is fast,” sighed one commenter, while another ranted that Windows file copying is “cursed,” recalling crashes just moving movie files around.
But the plot twist: the “works for me” crowd barged in. One user said their gigabit setup saturated the line with Explorer, Copy‑Item, and robocopy all performing fine, insisting something’s off in the original poster’s configuration—maybe network hiccups, drivers, or lag. The encryption debate also flared: some blamed SFTP’s security for slowing things down, but a skeptic shot back that this “shouldn’t be convincing” after a little thought, arguing the slowdown story isn’t that simple.
Amid the chaos came a recurring meme: PowerShell’s progress bars and “cute features” secretly throttling speed—“turn it off and it flies,” joked one, nodding to quirks like $ProgressPreference and slow web requests. In short: Explorer crowned “drag‑and‑drop king,” scripts accused of tripping over their own shoelaces, and the community split between Team Windows Is Weird and Team Check Your Settings. For the curious: yes, SFTP = secure file transfer protocol (what is SFTP?).
Key Points
- •File Explorer drag-and-drop achieved ~111–112 MBps, the fastest method tested.
- •PowerShell Copy-Item measured ~82 MBps, about 27% slower than File Explorer under defaults.
- •Windows built-in SFTP client reached ~70 MBps, roughly a 37% reduction versus File Explorer.
- •robocopy transferred at ~25 MBps using default options.
- •WSL 2 rsync initially ran at ~9 MBps; removing -z increased throughput to ~13 MBps (~30–50% improvement), still ~88% below File Explorer.