Which is faster -- Copy Handler or FastCopy?

Copying files in Windows can be slow and inflexible, so it makes sense to look for a little third-party help. And as we found out recently, it can make a real difference: FastCopy was able to copy files up to 30 percent faster than Windows, in some situations.

There are plenty of similar tools around, though, and one of the oldest, Copy Handler, recently saw its first release of 2011. Could the experience behind this nine-year-old open source project improve on FastCopy's excellent performance? We went back to the benchmarks in an effort to find out.

Initially the results didn't look good. Copying 4.23GB in two chunky ISO files took only 90 seconds in FastCopy, while Copy Handler trailed far behind with 121 seconds. And when we tried copying 119MB in 6,250 text files, the times were almost identical: 89 seconds for FastCopy, 121 for Copy Handler.

This wasn't exactly impressive, but we didn't want to stop there. Copy Handler is a likeable program with a better interface than FastCopy, many more features and excellent configurability. Could we apply any tweaks to improve its performance? Exploring the detailed Options dialog revealed a number of possibly helpful settings, and so we set Default Thread Priority to "Above normal," increased "Buffer size for copying inside one physical disk boundary" from 4kb to 32kb, and set "Disable buffering for large files" to "No."

When we ran the benchmarks again, it was clear that these changes made a huge difference. The ISO copy test now saw both FastCopy and Copy Handler returning the same 90 second time, and Copy Handler was now much closer on the small file test, too (95 seconds vs 89 for FastCopy).

Further tweaks couldn't improve on this, though, and so overall FastCopy remains the performance king. If you're not so happy with the FastCopy interface, though, it's well worth giving Copy Handler a try. The program is hugely configurable; its speeds (once tweaked) aren't so far behind FastCopy; and of course it provides excellent control over the copying process, allowing you to pause, resume, restart or cancel selected copy jobs at a click.