Recently, I was doing =
a little housecleaning in my Dropbox account. As such, I had the occasi=
on to move a folder out of Dropbox and onto the desktop temporarily. It=
happens that I performed this same action on two different machines, on=
e running Windows 7 and one running Linux Fedora 17 (with XFCE). Otherw=
ise, identical hardware.

Admittedly, it was a large copy operat=
ion. The folder copied with all of its subfolders and files added up to=
3.96 GB. Also, because of hard drive partitions (identical on both mac=
hines), it was a move operation, meaning copy and then delete the=
original.

On Windows, when I first dragged it, the pop up wind=
ow for the file operation said "calculating" for almost a minu=
te. Then it announced the time required would take 20 minutes. The tim=
e required slowly grew longer until it peaked at 14 hours remaining. Th=
e file operation did finally complete in about 14 or 15 minutes. At the=
time, I did nothing else on the Windows platform.

On Linux, wh=
en I first dragged it, the pop up window for the file operation instantly said it would take 3 =
minutes. Then it rapidly descended to 2 minutes, then 1 minute. The en=
tire operation required about 1 minute 45 seconds. It was going so well=
, I continued to run other applications and do other things on the Linux=
platform at the same time, and it did not seem to affect it at all.

I found this interesting.