Do copy acceleration utilities actually lower file transfer speeds?

[grr]

We’ve featured several file copy acceleration utilities on this site. Recently, however, we went in and did a head-to-head test to discover which of the many free options was the best at increasing copying speed. The results surprised us greatly: all of the tools we tested actually took longer for the file transfer than Windows Explorer.

This was obviously not the result we expected or wanted, so we re-did the test using a different set of files. When in the first round we used 367 files that collectively amounted to about 474 megabytes, in the second test we used 3 files that amounted again to about the same (493 megs), speculating that perhaps these kinds of copy utilities did better with large file SIZES rather than a large NUMBER of files. However, the result in both cases was the same. Several follow up measurements on other PC and operating systems also produced more or less the same results.

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