To properly appreciate a post like this one, it should ideally be paired with a Raymond Chen post that argues in Hercule Poirot style irrefutable logic how a combination of backwards-compatibility with CP/M and some 1990s programming done by raccoons means that this messed up state of affairs is logically the only way it could possibly be.
Raymond Chen from 2004, slightly unsatisfying[1]. Try
Mark Russinovich post with technical details about rewriting Explorer's copy routines from XP to Vista[2].
Windows 8 team blog on updating the copy dialog UX[3].
OP mentions using "Cat 7" cables - please don't buy these. Cat 7 isn't something that exists in TIA/EIA standards, only in ISO/IEC and it requires GG45 or TERA connectors. Cat 7 with RJ45 connectors isn't standardized, so you have no idea what you're actually getting. Stick with pure copper Cat 6A.
Absolutely agreeing with you but replying to you instead of multiple others below with my views on this.
Cat6A can do 10Gbps at 100m. Cat7 and Cat8 can do higher speeds in short runs but those technologies are DEAD in DC tech now. 40G is legacy tech using four lanes of 10G, replaced by 100G which is four lanes of 25G. Copper patch cables are not used with these, everything is fiber or DAC.
If you use a Cat7 or Cat8 cable the higher MHz support listed on the spec will never be used. When using a real cable of these qualities all you are really getting is better protection from outside interference.
When buying premade patch cables only buy Cat6A. Anything you see online saying Cat7 or Cat8 has probably never been properly tested by the manufacturer.
When buying a spool of wire do your research on the manufacturer. There's plenty with false labels out there. I once saw a spool of 'Cat6e' which is not a real standard.
When paying others to run cables find out what brand and what warranty the installer is providing. If they only use Cat7 and cannot provide a good explanation on why they might not actually know as much as you should be expecting them to.
Cat 7 with RJ45 sockets is standardized, which is ideal for running it in walls. Sure, you don't want to use it for patch cables, but over long runs in walls it's a great solution, especially due to the better shielding of Cat 7.
> so you have no idea what you're actually getting
As Cat 7 is only sold by the meter on a roll, you know just as much what you're getting as with Cat 6A, spec-compliant network cables.
OP here, I looked into it. For legal reasons I will neither confirm nor deny any marketing claims here and let the experts decide. I will merely list the equipment I bought. [0] [1] [2] [3]
One copy of each would run you around 75-85 euros in total by my napkin math. Sticking with standard CAT 6A would have probably been 10-15 euros cheaper, and since I'm only aiming for 1 Gbps, not 10, I might have been able to get away with CAT 5e, even.
I suspect that the additional hours of time I would have had to spend actually doing my research here to make a fully informed purchase would have made this a slightly net negative decision financially. But that's mostly because of the small size and modest needs of the network I was wiring up. If I were wiring up anything that scaled beyond my own apartment it would have been valuable to know this, so thank you, my career will go better as a result of this correction.
So everything I say in this comment is unlikely to have any real impact if you were to replace the cables and retest, but I'm saying it for educational purposes. The reason the specs are strict is not because it cannot be done on less but because the acceptable margins for error and risk are lower in non consumer settings.
That switch does have metal around the ports but I could not find any indication in a datasheet that it designed to accept shielded cables. I also don't know what other devices you are connecting to the switch. Proper usage of shielded twisted pair needs the shielding to make contact to ground on both sides of the cable. I was taught years ago that using a shielded cable with neither side grounded or just one side grounded had the potential to turn the shielding into an antenna and make interference worse than with an unshielded twisted pair cable.
The flat cable is concerning. Flat cables are not part of any twisted pair spec. There tends to be two kinds of flat ethernet cables. The first being completely flat with no twisted pairs at all and the second kind having each pair twisted around each other but then the four pairs are parallel in the falter sheathing. The second kind is better and from the pictures that cable might be the second kind. However 33 meters is very long for a flat cable. Ideally you shouldn't use them but if you have to keeping them very short like under 2 meters is ok.
The pages for the other two cables never even show the cables but what looks like 3d renderings. I personally do not like that and it makes me think less of the vendors. I doubt any of the three cables would pass a full qualification test for Cat7 but they are probably completely indistinguishable from qualified Cat5e (since you are only using 1g) unless you are using them next to high voltage power conduits or next to a high power broadcast antenna. This just comes down to "Cat7 consumer products are a marketing scam."
Yes, that's standardized but is only rated for up to 30 meters at the higher speeds you get from it, so it's not very useful outside of server room / data center applications and you probably want to be using fiber at that point.
For what it's worth, I recently bought a spool of CAT7 cable and a bunch of RJ45 connectors and made my own cables that perform well and reliably. I don't know if this was wise in the end but I was able to get what I needed out of it.
Just tried copying a 20GB file to my Windows desktop from a mounted Samba share through gigabit ethernet (nvme on both sides). Explorer, Copy-Item and robocopy all saturated the connection with no issues.
There's definitely something off about OP's setup, though I have no idea what it could be. I'd start by checking the latency between the machines. Might also be the network adapter or its drivers.
My first thought would be some kind of "security" software (maybe even as simple as windows defender) inspecting the files as they're coming in, which might be done for any process not on some allow-list. And maybe the allow-list is basically just "explorer.exe". And maybe it's faster at checking some processes than others.
rsync being that much slower makes no sense since back when I used windows I rsync was saturating 1 gig easily, this has to be running on a very slow pentium or something.
It also buffers the downloaded data completely into memory last time I checked. So downloading a file bigger than the available RAM just doesn't work and you have to use WebClient instead.
Another fun one is Extract-Archive which is painfully slow while using the System.IO.Compression.ZipFile CLR type directly is reasonably fast. Powershell is really a head scratcher sometimes.
The download being cached in RAM kind of makes sense, curl will do the same (up to a point) if the output stream is slower than the download itself. For a scripting language, I think it makes sense. Microsoft deciding to alias wget to Invoke-WebRequest does make for a rather annoying side effect, but perhaps it was to be expected as all of their aliases for GNU tools are poor replacements.
I tried to look into the whole Expand-Archive thing, but as of https://github.com/PowerShell/Microsoft.PowerShell.Archive/c... I can't even find the Expand-Archive cmdlet source code anymore. The archive files themselves seem to have "expand" be unimplemented. Unless they moved the expand command to another repo for some reason, it looks like the entire command will disappear at one point?
Still, it does look like Expand-Archive was using the plain old System.IO.Compression library for its file I/O, though, although there is a bit of pre-processing to validate paths existing and such, that may take a while.
Yep. And 'wget' is often alias for WebRequest in PowerShell. The amount of footguns I ran into while trying to get a simple Windows Container CI job running, oh man
This is atrocious. I get it, some things are less trivial than they seem - but I would be ashamed for shipping something like this, and even more for not fixing it.
I didn't think of this one, will try it out, thank you.
I'm under the impression that using COM objects here in 2025 is generally discouraged, however. My Outlook mass email sysadmin scripts will have to be pried from my cold dead hands either way.
Be nice if you listed any particular settings on the commands....
For robocopy, for example, if you're copying small files/bunch of directories use the /MT:$number flag. It's so much massively faster it's not like the same application.
Also is this a newer version of Windows that supports smb3, Explorer is likely using that to copy more in parallel.
For robocopy I realized only after pushing the article up that I let out I was using /MT:32. I put this in a comment at the bottom of the page since I was short on time and energy.
I am not surprised. My Windows 11 systems with modern and beefy hardware frequently runs very slow for reasons unknown. I did use https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat recently and that seemed to have helped. Windows by default comes with a lot of crap that most of us do not use but it consumes resources anyway.
I have been considering a move back to Linux. It is only Microsoft Teams on Windows that I have to use daily that is holding me back.
Readit News
Windows 8 team blog on updating the copy dialog UX[3].
[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040106-00/?p=41...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20120608005952/http://blogs.tech...
[3] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/b8/improving...
Cat6A can do 10Gbps at 100m. Cat7 and Cat8 can do higher speeds in short runs but those technologies are DEAD in DC tech now. 40G is legacy tech using four lanes of 10G, replaced by 100G which is four lanes of 25G. Copper patch cables are not used with these, everything is fiber or DAC.
If you use a Cat7 or Cat8 cable the higher MHz support listed on the spec will never be used. When using a real cable of these qualities all you are really getting is better protection from outside interference.
When buying premade patch cables only buy Cat6A. Anything you see online saying Cat7 or Cat8 has probably never been properly tested by the manufacturer.
When buying a spool of wire do your research on the manufacturer. There's plenty with false labels out there. I once saw a spool of 'Cat6e' which is not a real standard.
When paying others to run cables find out what brand and what warranty the installer is providing. If they only use Cat7 and cannot provide a good explanation on why they might not actually know as much as you should be expecting them to.
> so you have no idea what you're actually getting
As Cat 7 is only sold by the meter on a roll, you know just as much what you're getting as with Cat 6A, spec-compliant network cables.
[0]: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B01EXDG2MO - "TP-Link TL-SG108 V3 8-ports Gigabit Network Switch"
[1]: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B07WG8TNDL - "CSL Cat 7 Network Cable, Gigabit, Ethernet, LAN Cable, PiMF Shielding With RJ 45 Connector, Switch, Router, Modem Access Point, White"
[2]: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B06XCYC4K7 - "deleyCON 5 x 0.5 m Cat7 Network Cables, Short, 10 Gigabit, RJ45 Patch Ethernet Cable, Copper, SFTP PiMF Shielding, LAN, DSL for Switches, Modems, Router, Patch Panels, Cat6, Cat5 Compatible, Black"
[3]: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B089MF1LZN - "Amazon Basics 30.5m White Flat RJ45 CAT7 Gigabit Ethernet Patch Internet Cable"
One copy of each would run you around 75-85 euros in total by my napkin math. Sticking with standard CAT 6A would have probably been 10-15 euros cheaper, and since I'm only aiming for 1 Gbps, not 10, I might have been able to get away with CAT 5e, even.
I suspect that the additional hours of time I would have had to spend actually doing my research here to make a fully informed purchase would have made this a slightly net negative decision financially. But that's mostly because of the small size and modest needs of the network I was wiring up. If I were wiring up anything that scaled beyond my own apartment it would have been valuable to know this, so thank you, my career will go better as a result of this correction.
That switch does have metal around the ports but I could not find any indication in a datasheet that it designed to accept shielded cables. I also don't know what other devices you are connecting to the switch. Proper usage of shielded twisted pair needs the shielding to make contact to ground on both sides of the cable. I was taught years ago that using a shielded cable with neither side grounded or just one side grounded had the potential to turn the shielding into an antenna and make interference worse than with an unshielded twisted pair cable.
The flat cable is concerning. Flat cables are not part of any twisted pair spec. There tends to be two kinds of flat ethernet cables. The first being completely flat with no twisted pairs at all and the second kind having each pair twisted around each other but then the four pairs are parallel in the falter sheathing. The second kind is better and from the pictures that cable might be the second kind. However 33 meters is very long for a flat cable. Ideally you shouldn't use them but if you have to keeping them very short like under 2 meters is ok.
The pages for the other two cables never even show the cables but what looks like 3d renderings. I personally do not like that and it makes me think less of the vendors. I doubt any of the three cables would pass a full qualification test for Cat7 but they are probably completely indistinguishable from qualified Cat5e (since you are only using 1g) unless you are using them next to high voltage power conduits or next to a high power broadcast antenna. This just comes down to "Cat7 consumer products are a marketing scam."
There's definitely something off about OP's setup, though I have no idea what it could be. I'd start by checking the latency between the machines. Might also be the network adapter or its drivers.
PowerShell has some "interesting" design choices...
Another fun one is Extract-Archive which is painfully slow while using the System.IO.Compression.ZipFile CLR type directly is reasonably fast. Powershell is really a head scratcher sometimes.
I tried to look into the whole Expand-Archive thing, but as of https://github.com/PowerShell/Microsoft.PowerShell.Archive/c... I can't even find the Expand-Archive cmdlet source code anymore. The archive files themselves seem to have "expand" be unimplemented. Unless they moved the expand command to another repo for some reason, it looks like the entire command will disappear at one point?
Still, it does look like Expand-Archive was using the plain old System.IO.Compression library for its file I/O, though, although there is a bit of pre-processing to validate paths existing and such, that may take a while.
You can use Powershell.
Even someone who has never seen a Windows PC in their life could guess what this script does.
Linux and Unix shell commands use completely arbitrary single letter parameters that must be looked up or memorised. That’s not a virtue.
I'm under the impression that using COM objects here in 2025 is generally discouraged, however. My Outlook mass email sysadmin scripts will have to be pried from my cold dead hands either way.
For robocopy, for example, if you're copying small files/bunch of directories use the /MT:$number flag. It's so much massively faster it's not like the same application.
Also is this a newer version of Windows that supports smb3, Explorer is likely using that to copy more in parallel.
I have been considering a move back to Linux. It is only Microsoft Teams on Windows that I have to use daily that is holding me back.
Me too. I've not tried this yet, but will soon: https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux
I‘m very sorry.
Dead Comment