Local copying with minimal disk activity.

[Tom Limoncelli]

How do I minimize the amount of disk activity?

I'm copying a large number of files:

	rsync -av -W /from/here/. /to/here/.

I'm using rsync because I need the incremental updates and other features. 
Otherwise, I'd use tar piped to tar or some similar technique.

Note: Both the source and destination are "local".  Well, not really.  The
source is a network-mounted partition (SAMBA), and the destination is a
real disk.

I'd like to minimize the amount of network activity since that seems to be
my bottleneck.  For example, without the "-W" option, every file is read
twice (once to checksum, once to copy).

Are there other options that I could enable to speed up the copy?

Is using -W dangerous?  If I'm doing an incremental update (a file or two
changed on the source, so I need to recopy the data) will -W catch as much
as checksuming if the file timestamps change?

Thanks in advance!
--Tom