Move Large Video Files Fast

[lennyt]

Does anyone know of a Program or utility that will copy or move large video files from one hard drive to another. I am looking for something that works fast. WindowsXP Explorer is a bit slow.

[Jeremy of Many]

Uhm, the speed at which files are copied from one harddrive to another is determined by how fast your HD actually is. No program in the world will make it go any faster...

[lennyt]

Jeremy, Uhm, I know that!!. I thought there is something out there that is a little better then the XP file mgr.

[levick]

Add a Raid card and second HDD and configure the card for Raid 0. No data protection but the
improvement by sharing data over two HDDs is noticeable.

[edDV]

Or Gigabit Ethernet between machines.

[redwudz]

lennyt, what kind of transfer speeds are you getting? You might try a benchmarking program like Sandra to check your transfer speeds and compare them to a similar drive. You may have a problem with one of your drives.

I checked one of my SATA drives recently: 50MB/s and 7ms access time, so it seems to be fine. It can also test drive speeds on a server over a LAN.

Sandra Lite 2007: http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=75

[jimmalenko]

Uhm, the speed at which files are copied from one harddrive to another is determined by how fast your HD actually is. No program in the world will make it go any faster...

I've found copying files using a DOS (command) window or alternatively by using a DOS batch file or VBS script to provide some minor speed enhancements as compared to Windows Explorer. Software overhead removed perhaps ?

[ark]

The movement of large files using Windows Explorer copy and paste (or dragging - it is the same basically as copy and paste) - whether between logical drives / disks on the same PC or drives /disks on networked PC is quite slow.

One method which is very fast is GHOST cloning. This can be used when to transfer very large volumes of data between two networked PCs. One has to dedicate a partition (a logical drive)on each PC and then clone one from the other using GHOST.

For fast copying on same PC - using some programs like Womble MPEG VCR speeds up the process - Womble will handle only MPEG.

For AVI files (MS avi or divX or Xvid), VirtualDub with appropriate codec does the same task (use both video & audio direct stream copy)

[JerryB]

Does anyone know of a Program or utility that will copy or move large video files from one hard drive to another. I am looking for something that works fast. WindowsXP Explorer is a bit slow.

hi...
like jimmalenko
First explorer is slow...... and very cumbersom...... and limited......

LIke jimmalenko mentioned.. using msdos commands would be faster because of the fact your not going thru windows..... now yo can use msdos batch file to automated things if you do have large quanties of moving things around......

Now there a a few windows file manager that might be better than windows file manager but I haven't seen any reviews on speed yet on them....

http://www.softwarelight.com/index.php?category=File+managers&program=2xExplorer

http://www.softpedia.com/get/File-managers/freeCommander.shtml

it would be better if you can obtain a msdos shell file manager type program... but i haven't seen any yet that works under the ntfs environment.... I have norton commander on my other machine (win98 .. fat32) and it works great... but not sure it works with ntfs

Now I uses a couple of graphic programs where there file manager abilities is real good... but i deal with mostly various graphic file but they do handle a few of the multimedia files like mpg, mov, avi ..... I don't know if your files are in different formats but if there in those formats it can move them around them arond fairly well....

[ahhaa]

You might also check if your Antivirus is scanning the files while transferring. I found Trend was doing that while burning a CD- doubled the time!:]