I did some tests with a local drive and it topped out at about 2.5 Gbps, doubling my ingest to the network drive. Why is PM better with Local drives than networked drives? PM can clearly go faster (although still not fast as a windows copy, which topped out at 6 Gbps on the local drive and 5 Gbps on the network drive). The bandwidth is there, PM just can't utilize all of it.
Would this be a feature request? Maybe PM could do some sort of multi thread copy to increase throughput?
It can't be multi-threaded in the case where metadata is being applied/folders being created/sequence numbers used in naming/etc. due to the sequential nature of such operations.
Why is it slow on a networked drive? Because of the pattern of writes (depending on the file type and your IPTC/XMP metadata settings) can be small chunks of data, and network protocols having large overhead per write operation.
Could it be sped up? Perhaps if we did all of the writing to memory and then copied in one big chunk, it would speed up a bit, but there is still overhead in parsing the metadata of the file, expanding variables, serializing metadata, etc. It's a lot less work to flat copy a file than what PM's Ingest does.
Feel free to make a feature request.
-Kirk
