Copying 500 GB SQL Server database from Production to Dev instance We need to copy 500 GB database from our PRODUCTION server to a DEV server. We only have a window of 5 hours.

What would be the quickest way to achieve this?
There are two options you can do that will not cause any downtime to your production environment:

1) If you only want to grab the database structure itself (you don't need the data) you can simply script out the production database. Then simply run that on your dev server to create the database.

2) If you need the database and the data simply grab the latest backup of that database and restore it to your dev server. You will find that this is the most common method used to keep the development servers matched up to production data.