Teracopy is *really* fast for copying files

Posted by james on Apr 12, 2010 3:10 PM

I saw this listed on Lifehacker, but I was a little skeptical. Teracopy is supposed to speed up file copies, it's freeware, and it's a drop-in replacement for the existing Windows copy mechanism.

Here's my completely unscientific, very-small-sample-size benchmarks:

Copy a folder with tons of small files & .svn folders, 22.7MB big. Made a copy of the folder twice with each method. Alternated methods to make sure FS cache did not influence results unfairly.

Normal copy & paste: 19.21s, 18.32s
Teracopy: 7.83s, 6.12s

Wow. Now, this is on a OCZ Vertex 60GB drive, so admittedly the drive is fast to begin with. But a simple freeware drop-in that speeds things up that much? I'm sold.

Go download Teracopy.

PS. This reminds me of those stupid "gain more memory" freeware apps for Windows 9x. Except that this actually works. Something about dynamically adjusting copy buffers, makes sense to me.