Why do you say preferred 1KB, when in the same sentence you say the preferred block size is 1MB?
Sorry, my mistake. Let me give you some actual results: when using the "preferred" 1_048_576 block size (returned by URLResourceKey.preferredIOBlockSizeKey) it takes about 6.15 seconds to copy a 7 GB file from my Mac to another folder on the same Mac. When using 16_777_216 block size, I get about 3 seconds instead. If I don't set the block size option for filecopy, I get about the same time as with the preferred block size, so I guess it's probably the same value.
My question is: what makes the 1_048_576 block size "preferred", since using 16_777_216 drastically increases the filecopy performance? And can we assume that increasing the block size will always give better performance for filecopy?