I was looking for ways to boost the speed at which files copy from drive to drive. In my search, I found an excellent free option called TeraCopy. It has a very nice feature list and a pro-version of TeraCopy can be tested for 30 days before committing to 14.95 (in euro, about 2o usd).
Features:
- Copy files faster. TeraCopy uses dynamically adjusted buffers to reduce seek times. Asynchronous copy speeds up file transfer between two physical hard drives.
- 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.
To find out if I really was getting any speed boost though, I decided to do some tests with TeraCopy and Windows Explorer Copy. I’ve always known that copy on Windows Vista was to say the least, slow.
A faster transfer
My tests were pretty simple, nothing scientific here either. The results aren’t comprehensive enough to merit a definitive answer. I think you should try TeraCopy regardless. TC means TeraCopy and WC means Windows Copy, times are in minutes:seconds format.
My first test was moving a Fedora 10 ISO, about 3.89 GB, from one drive letter to another drive letter on a physical drive. In this test, my average time for TC was 2:36 while for WC, the time was 3:12. TC was 24% faster on average than WC.
The second test was moving the same Fedora ISO but it was being copied to a different physical drive. The average time for TC was 1:17 while for WC it was 1:23. Tiny difference being 5%.
The third test was moving 1.5GB of music files from one drive letter to a different drive letter on the same physical drive. The average time for TC was 1:05 and for WC the time was 1:11. Not much of a difference here, only 6% at most.
Finally the final test was moving the same music files to a different physical drive. This took TC only 36 seconds while it took WC 46 seconds. That’s a small difference, only 15%.
So in the end, it appear that TeraCopy is just slightly faster, maybe just 12% faster than Windows Copy. Is that enough to keep it around? I think so.
