Another Nice Piece of Software

I'm not opposed to buying software when it works well, but I decided to look around for a simpler, faster alternative to Total Commander. It did a good job of copying files, and it also appears to do a ton more. Most likely I would never use many of it's features. In my search for a simple way to copy files as fast as possible, I came across TeraCopy. I'm now using it to finish the copying of files to one of my NAS boxes, and it is consistently pushing the data at 4MB/s. That's pretty fast when considering that the target is an Infrant ReadyNAS NV running XRAID. It's about twice as fast as what Total Commander was able to average. Plus, it's free for home use and couldn't be simpler to use. It just integrates itself into Windows Explorer and shows up as an option whenever you do a right-click drag (TeraCopy and TeraMove the selected folder(s) and/or file(s)). I'm running 2.0 Beta 2, and it's working beautifully so far. What did we ever do with computers before the internet and google allowed us to find really nice applications to satisfy every need? Well, maybe not every need. I still have to write the occasional tool to do some random task, but that's what keeps things interesting. At some point, I'll put a list of little applications I've written up here to share with anybody who wants them.

Thumbs Up To Seagate and Total Commander

I just wanted to take the opportunity to give a big thumbs up to Seagate. I recently sent in a 400GB drive that was maybe 18 months old for warranty replacement due to some SmartDisk errors I was getting. Yesterday, the UPS guy dropped of a 750GB drive that they sent me in return. Always nice to get a free upgrade, and I needed another 750 for one of my NAS boxes. So, it worked out perfectly. Thanks, Seagate!

So, I somehow managed to configure the RAID level wrong on said NAS. So, to add the new drive, I had to rebuild the whole thing. That meant transferring a few hundred GB of files off and then back on to the NAS. In trying to perform this task through Vista, it was constantly stuck for up to 10 minutes just analyzing and trying to determine the time remaining. When it finally did start copying the files, it was extremely slow with remaining time measured in days (up to 17 at one point) instead of hours, and this was with a folder containing only 1.9GB or so. In an effort to avoid using Vista for these large file transfers, I did a search and found Total Commander. I'm still in the process of moving files, but it took little time (maybe 10 seconds) to analyze the same folder and only 25 minutes or so to transfer the files. If this ability exists, why does the file management functionality in Vista need to be so bloated and slow? At any rate, I highly recommend Total Commander even though the interface isn't great. It does exactly what I wanted and does it well. That's good enough for me.