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Archive for November 25th, 2009

I remember this tool from several years ago and quite frankly it’s something that should be built directly into Windows. It’s a multi-threaded file copy program that can efficiently handle thousands of files and poor connections. The main thing is that it won’t get stuck on a single big file while other, smaller files are waiting to be copied.

Right now I’m using it to copy 250+GB of pictures to a secondary location. Using normal Windows it would copy one file at a time. With RichCopy it copies three at a time. It’s moving right along to try and make sure I don’t lose any more information because of the chaos Western Digital has caused.

If you haven’t looked into RichCopy it’s worth investigating. It’s a free tool that can speed up the copy process and be used as a sync tool as well since it does a file compare before taking action. Plus, it’s free. Again, this should be part of Windows and ironically it’s written by Microsoft, or at least a developer within Microsoft.

If you want to learn more you can read the article about it here:
Utility Spotlight – RichCopy
Or if you want to go for broke and just download it, click here:

RichCopy is a free utility that comes to us from Ken Tamaru of Microsoft. The tool was first developed in 2001 and has been updated regularly to keep pace with evolving needs. Trust me when I tell you, this is the answer to all your file copying needs. What you’ll find most striking the first time you take RichCopy out for a spin is that it’s a multithreaded copying tool. That means that rather than copying one file at a time in serial order, RichCopy can open multiple threads simultaneously, allowing many files to be copied in parallel and cutting the total time required to complete the operation several times over. You can also pause and resume file copy operations, so if you lose network connectivity at any point, you can just pick up where you left off.

Either I’m having really bad luck or Western Digital is making crap drives. Just before Halloween I bought a new 1TB drive to replace the 500GB that failed. If you recall I have two Western Digital 500GB drives that mirror each other with all my pictures stored on them. Since I can’t replace these files I needed to get my backup in place and dupes of all the files. Now that I have dupes of the files my other Western Digital 500GB has decided to call it quits. The drive is throwing delayed write errors and the Event Log looks like a stuck pig full of red event errors.

Now it’s not like the drive has been pleading for help for weeks and I’ve just turned a blind eye to the situation. The drive literally started throwing errors a few hours ago and now it’s unreadable by Windows. Plus, I got the drive in October 2007 so the damn thing is just barely past two years old. Additionally I haven’t been using that machine very much this past year so the drive quite literally has only a few hours of actual use on it.

To put it bluntly I’m f@$king furious with Western Digital right now. The odds of two drives failing that close together are astronomical, but yet they did. And I can only count my blessings for getting a new drive and copying the files over before the other piece of $hit failed tonight. I was right on the cusp of losing four years worth of digital photos. Every single picture I’ve taken is on those drives. I thought a mirror would be the most practical way of having a backup. In this case it actually did work, but the backup is only as good as the drives themselves and from where I sit Western Digital drives are pieces of junk and can’t be trusted.

Suffice it to say that is the last Western Digital drive I’m ever going to buy and I will never recommend one to anyone ever again. Had the drives been five or six years old with thousands of hours on them this might make sense. But they’re not. Two years old and minimum usage hardly explains what’s happened.

I’m running a check on the drive that Windows can still partially access, although I’m not sure why since I can’t trust the drive and won’t ever put anything important on it. They’re nothing more than fancy paperweights with pretty blue and green flashing buttons on them.

As I write this I’m copying my files to a non Western Digital drive so I will once again have two copies. I really can’t believe these two pieces of crap failed this close together. Maybe the internal drives are better, but I’m never getting a WD MyBook or another version ever again. Having a mirror of my images definitely saved me, but this goes to show you your backups are only as good as the drives they sit on.

Western Digital, you suck.