I use scp A LOT. And I love scp A LOT.

The SCP protocol is a network protocol that supports file transfers. The SCP protocol, is based on the BSD RCP protocol which is tunneled through the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol to provide encryption and authentication.

Most of the times, when transferring data files in my local network, there is no need for encryption. It that case you can avoid the encryption part and gain much in speed.

It seems that the use of scp with the “-c none” flag is not working since version 2, so rcp is now the preffered choice!
example:
rcp localfile.txt ventrix@localmachine: