Deleting with Windows Explorer is rubbish because it wastes lots of time enumerating the files. I usually move the stuff I need to delete to C:\stufftodelete and have a deletestuff.bat batch file to rmdir /s/q C:\stufftodelete. This is scheduled to run at night, but sometimes I need to run it during the day so the quicker the better.

Here’s the results of a quick time test of a small 5.85 MB sample of 960 files in 303 folders. I ran method 1 followed by method 2, then reset the test directories.

Method 1 removes the files and directory structure in one pass:

rmdir /s/q foldername

Method 2 has a first pass to delete files and outputs to nul to avoid the overhead of writing to screen for every singe file. A second pass then cleans up the remaining directory structure:

del /f/s/q foldername > nul
rmdir /s/q foldername

• Method 1: 17.5s, 14.9s, 13.9s, 14.8s, 13.8s: average 14.98 seconds
• Method 2: 14.3s, 12.1s, 11.7s, 14.2s, 11.8s: average 12.82 seconds

Here’s results of another test using 404 MB of 19,521 files in 3,243 folders:

• Method 1: 2 minutes 20 seconds
• Method 2: 2 minutes 33 seconds

So there’s not much in it, probably too close to judge on a single test.

Edit: I’ve retested with much more data, this is a typical case for me: 28.3 GB of 1,159,211 files in 146,918 folders:

• Method 1: 2h 15m, 2h 34m: average: 2 hours 25 minutes
• Method 2: 49m, 57m: average: 53 minutes