Benchmark Comparison: Windows File Transfer Tool Speeds Show Copy-Item 27% Slower Than Drag-and-Drop

Summary

The article presents benchmark results comparing file transfer speeds of various Windows tools, revealing that PowerShell's Copy-Item command is 27% slower than File Explorer's drag-and-drop method. The author shares personal frustration with these performance discrepancies discovered while setting up a home lab network. The benchmarks show drag-and-drop achieving ~112 MBps, Copy-Item at ~82 MBps, SFTP at ~70 MBps, robocopy with multithreading at ~25 MBps, and WSL 2 rsync at only ~13 MBps, highlighting significant performance variations between different file transfer methods on Windows.