Not all that shines is gold

Apple might like to polish their user interfaces, but sometimes the logic underneath is … less polished.

I’ve had to transfer large amounts of data from one external USB disk to another today. Running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac Mini.

Guess which one of the following graphs show the faster method?  

Apparently OSX Finder does read-to-mem, write-to-disk, read-to-mem, write-to-disk - serially. Path Finder, a replacement, is thus twice as fast since it transfers the data in a synchronous read-write operation.

(I’ve also realised that Activity Monitor, from which the above two screen grabs are taken, overstates the transfer rates with almost exactly 2x the actual speed) Bad Apple.