Copy folders from one shared drive to another?

[Kelemvor]

I've wondered this for a long time but never found a 100% for sure answers so let's see if someone here knows...

Let's say I'm on PC1. I have a mapped drive to PC2 and another mapped drive to PC3. If I go to PC2 and Copy a file and then go and Paste it to PC3, does the file just go right from PC2 to PC3 over the network or does the file go from PC2 through PC1 to PC3?

So like if PC1 is my wireless laptop and I need to copy a file between 2 wired PCs on my network, just wondering if doing it from the laptop will ake it go real slow or if the other two PCs will just hook up and the laptop really won't be involved.

 

[Madwand1]

You're generally better off going to the machine that's holding the data, and initiating a transfer from that to the destination machine. You can even use Remote Desktop or VNC or something like that for this.

You can confirm that there's no third-party source-to-destination optimization by looking at the Task Manager / Network tab or PerfMon networking -- if the transfer was direct, you wouldn't see significant network traffic to your third-party computer. 'fraid it ain't so.