RoboCopy , Virtual Hard Disk, or other?

Question

We an distributing 230K files, (873MB) of smallish JPG files on DVD. The install program will place these files in an Apache Virtual folder.

Setup(.exe) is taking a too long for our customers. Our initial approach was to create a ZIP and copy from the DVD and unzip to the client Hard disk.

I just tried a RoboCopy (we have a win7 (64 bit) 4 core computer. I tried with 16 threads. Pretty poor. Over Five Hours.

Options : *.* /V /S /COPY:DAT /NP /MT:16 /R:5 /W:30
         Copied   
Dirs :          6        
Files :     230236         
Bytes :   873.80 m        
Times :    5:28:56   

The DVD needs to be discarded after use, so the files need to be on the target machine. We did also try and ISO image. Not bad, takes about 10 minutes to copy, and then there is software for mounting the ISO as Drive Letter, which can be virtual folders to Apache, but the peformance with Apache is not good (used http://www.magiciso.com/ ) to mount. Besides ISO is limited size and Read-Only.

Now we are considering Virtual Hard Drive http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee872416.aspx

But I have not given up on Roboform. Should I be using different switches? or is a VHD the best way to go?

Target machines are 4+ core, 10TB 24GB RAM win2008 servers.

Answer 1

I got the answer from a different thread. Basically, we are creating a Microsoft VHD (virtual Hard Disk) and filling in the files with RoboCopy and shipping the VHD.

See: Unzip too slow for transfer of many files