I was trying to move some files into a folder (E: to E: so i'm pretty sure it's moving and not copying) but it's taking like minutes just to move some 60k files. I was under the impression that file moving is supposed to be really fast, so I was curious what does the computer have to do to move some files into a folder?
(I'm using Windows Vista Home Premium Sp2, but actually I was hoping to target the question in a broader way)
Even though you are just moving the files to a folder that is on the same disk, the filesystem still has to do a bit of work to move the files. The Master File Table (MFT) has to be updated to reflect the new location of the files, and the filesystem journal also has to be updated to allow changes to be rolled back in case the move is interrupted by a power outage, etc.
I'm not sure how to calculate exactly how many different things that the filesystem has to do, but we can assume that it will have to do at least 60k changes to the MFT. This many changes entails a lot of small reads and writes, which hard drives are not very fast at.
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