I’ve been using TeraCopy for the last couple of weeks on my Windows XP systems and I have to say it’s one of the neatest utilities I’ve seen in a while. I’ve always felt the Windows “copy/move” dialog box as uninformative and in need of improvement.

TeraCopy improves copying/moving by adding an adjustable buffer to smooth out copies and speed them up in some cases with less disk thrashing. For instance on a system to USB external disk transfer, I was getting 16-20MB/s with the default 256KB buffer. Sliding it to several MB of buffer, the transfer becomes 25-26MB/s constant. That’s a huge improvement!

Better yet, if something fails, it actually shows you where the problem happened and allows you to attempt the operation again. It also can take the place of your regular dialog boxes so it’s seamless usage. You can also pause/resume transfers too!

Anyways, it’s highly recommended by me if you want smarter copying and moving of files. It’s free too so you can’t go wrong.

http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.asp

-gr00vy0ne

I am excited to use this little utility and thanks for the recommendation. Did you slide the buffer to 2MB? I am not sure what is the optimal setting.

Nice Find Gr00vy!.. I downloaded it. I also found the other application (Jetstart) interesting.

Secure Samurai - 13 June 2007 07:01 PM

I am excited to use this little utility and thanks for the recommendation. Did you slide the buffer to 2MB? I am not sure what is the optimal setting.

It’s up to you. I have found that it depends on what you’re copy to (you’re system) and how much you’re copying. Certain file sizes will appreciate more memory.

For instance, I was copying DVR-MS files from my Media Center PC to an external drive. These are files that are 4-20GB in size. So, I noticed immediate improvement at 4MB. Sliding it maxed to 12MB made it hit the peak transfer rate of around 44MB/s. Sliding to 20MB kept the transfer rate at 44-45MB/s with slightly less hard disk accesses.

So, your experience may vary. Smaller files will probably require a smaller buffer. The best thing is that you can modify the buffer while the copy is going on.

Thanks for the reply gr00vy0ne. I will play around with the settings as I am transferring files. So far, I have only used it once and it seemed faster!

it looks pretty interesting, i havn’t tried it yet, but any chance that it support command prompt?