Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
teracopy: copy your files faster
wraith808:
Open Source isn't the holy grail to me. It's useful for some things, and not so much for others. Teracopy already has a lot going for it and it's free... so I'm not going to start with something that doesn't do what I need, just because it's OS. And teracopy itself is actually only a little bigger... so I can allow it a few bytes since after you added all the additional features to PC, it would probably be just as big. ;)
f0dder:
ut... it doesn't do the primary thing teracopy does... copy things faster!
-wraith808 (February 22, 2008, 11:27 PM)
--- End quote ---
Benchmarked, or throwing a tongue-in-cheek statement? :)
Does the teracopy folks explain how they achieve better speed, or is it all black box magic? There's a lot of parameters to tweak in a file copy routine... like, whether you scan all source files for size so you can check if there's enough room on destination, whether to use buffered or unbuffered file I/O, how large blocks you operate on, etc.
wraith808:
I've compared it to plain vanilla copying, and it is indeed faster. :P
As far as the how, this is what it says on the site: TeraCopy uses dynamically adjusted buffers to reduce seek times. Asynchronous copy speeds up file transfer between two physical hard drives.
I understand the words, but it's still black box to me. :)
Other features:
# Pause and resume file transfers. Pause copy process at any time to free up system resources and continue with a single click.
# Error recovery. In case of copy error, TeraCopy will try several times and in the worse case just skips the file, not terminating the entire transfer.
# Interactive file list. TeraCopy shows failed file transfers and lets you fix the problem and recopy only problem files.
# Shell integration. TeraCopy can completely replace Explorer copy and move functions, allowing you work with files as usual.
# Full Unicode support.
The pause and resume, error recovery, and interactive file list are very useful too...
f0dder:
wraith808: I thought you were on about PerigreeCopy vs. TeraCopy, not vanilla explorer copy vs. TeraCopy :)
"dynamically adjusted buffers to reduce seek times" sounds a bit bull, because you'd have to take file fragmentation into consideration as well, to reduce seek times... async (aka overlapped) file I/O is good though, instead of issuing a read, waiting for that, issuing a write, wait for that (etc.) you overlap the operations - which basically means you can have read #2 taking place at the same time as write #1.
wraith808:
Well, the reason I didn't compare PC to TC is because on PC's page it makes no claim to making the copy faster- it just adds some niceties to the copying process like not failing out if one file fails, etc. ;)
As far as the second part- it makes more sense when you explain it than when they do. :D
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