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Teracopy ...
Thanks for this hint. It's really useful for me.
I observed only a 10-15% improvement in speed moving large files to another partition on the same drive.
When i copy only a single file with Windows Explorer, I can keep on working at the comp or get a cup of coffee and it's done when i return :-)
Teracopy starts to be really useful when you do several copy or move operations in a row, most of all when moving files which shall be copied before the move, and when copying/moving very many or very large files or from/to many different directories, which would slow down or even can crash the windows explorer, and after starting a copy/move in windows explorer, I would have no control over the process (besides aborting it completely; no options to start later, pause, modify(!) or resume)
Since this is the talk forum, I'll give a few examples how well it served me on using it for the second day :-)
Example 1: i just had 30 movies (around 60 GB) and wanted to move them from one external "working data" USB drive to another "storage data" USB drive, using different destination directories to sort them by genre etc. When I do this with the Vista Explorer, I end up having around 15 copy processes running parallel and sharing a bandwidth of at most 6 to 7 MB/sec (at first, and most of the time dropping to shared 3-4 MB/sec or even lower over time, sometimes even getting timeouts, terrible lag on the entire comp, etc, and doing a single copy operation for 200 files with 400 GB is almost impossible with Windows). Now I did the same (mark files and drag to destination), and this started Teracopy 15 times, with the first of them running and the others being in a state "copy waiting". If needed, i can manually "start now" any of those waiting processes and/or "pause" any of the running processes with a single button, and the first of them will start automatically only when no other is running any longer (*). During the entire copy operations, the bandwidth seems to be a constant 7+ MB/sec, thus at least as fast as Vista Explorer, and not deteriorating over time or causing crashes. Copying 200 GB was a matter of only hours in the background and not days of exclusive copying :-)
btw: in addition to other problems, having several copy operations at the same time might also cause more fragmentation of the drive.
(*) small problem: when I started a few dozen copies at the same time, the last seems to not have seen a running process and thus started automatically, but below 20-40 parallel copies, it always worked perfectly :-)
Example 2 : parallel to the above (copy from one USB drive to second), i started copying from my emtec media cube (connected as another third USB drive :-) to my internal harddisk, and (without exactly measuring times) it looked as if both copies ran at 6+ MB/sec (instead of a Windows Explorer copy which would have split 6 or later even less MB/sec among them). btw: Windows seems to randomly assign bandwidth to those copy operations, eg sometimes splitting 6 MB/sec evenly to 2-2-2, and at other times to 1-2-3, or 1-1-4, or even 10-100-2890 KB/sec, while Teracopy seems to evenly split the available bandwidth among all running copy processes.
Example 3: this is an advanced version of example 1 ... moving 50 Files to different subdirectories on two external drives, using one of them as data storage for movies and the other as backup (with identical directory structure and contents). Not using any backup software or similar, I just copied a group of files once to one drive, and then moved the same group of files to the corresponding location on the other. Using Windows, I first need to wait for the first copy to finish until I can start moving the files (alternative: copy to both locations at the same time and manually delete files afterwards, but that once caused me a few duplicates and a few missing files since i deleted not exactly what i had started copying a few hours earlier. thus i prefer moving them). With Teracopy today, I copied the first group to the first drive (simple drag and drop in windows explorer) and immediately moved the same files to the other backup drive (simple drag and drop with shift held down in windows explorer), followed by similar copies and moves for more groups of files. I ended up with having around 40 Teracopy processes queued up on a large taskbar (alternating "copy wait" and "move wait"). After several hours 20 copies and 20 moves were properly done for a total of shuffling around 2x100 GB, and this might have been possible completely unattended instead of starting a new copy/move group every 10-30 minutes (when using windows explorer without Teracopy).
Another approach to achieve the same result could be to start only the series of copies (no moves) and set Teracopy up to not close the window on completion. After completion of a copy (or after completion of all copies half a day later), for all those finished copy windows, the destination could be changed to the other drive, the method (copy vs move) could be changed, the window set to autoclose after completion, and then the operation could be started again. Thus all copy operations would be done again for the other backup drive, but this time removing all copied files. After yet another half day of unattended work, the files would be at the intended locations.
{edit: my comp just finished 2x125+200=450 files with 2x225+100=
550 GB in less than a day unattended and/or in the background; for comparison: a
max bandwidth of 7 MB/sec would result in 7*3600*24/1024=590 GB in 24 hours, and standard windows explorer might slow this down to an
average bandwidth below 2 MB/sec resulting in 3+ days of work around the clock with intervention at least every half hour}
In addition to the above, even the free Teracopy has some more options, a display of the list of all selected files, etc
Big Thanks again for recommending Teracopy !
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