The "scheduled for the next update in a few months" announcement in this post is now more than two years old. When Opus 9 came out, the necessity to ditch it in favor of implementing Vista compatibility was a good reason. Congratulations on postponing this topic until the next major Windows update.
Some things have changed since this was first requested:
[ul]There are partially working third party solutions like the CopyHandler, but none of them implements a mechanism that automatically adapts parallel operations for maximum speed and they all look alien when using Opus.[/ul][ul]The average amount of RAM has grown, which allows for much larger NTFS caches. I have seen copy operations on my computer reported by Opus at 900MB/s, just because Vista did it all from the cache. Harddisk sizes and speeds have also grown and RAID arrays are much more common.[/ul][ul]Native Command Queuing has improved the performance of parallel HDD operations, but not by much. They still get ridiculously slow when the heads have to work at many places of the disk surface "in parallel".[/ul][ul]Solid State Drives are just around the corner as operating system drive for everyone, but they won't replace harddisks for storing large amounts of data for many years to come. The next years will see most of us using SSDs and HDDs in parallel.[/ul]Years ago it was easy to tell in advance which combinations of parallel copy operations would be fast and which would be slow, now measuring of parallel operations is the way to go: Start every new copy operation parallel to already running ones and measure the combined speed. If the overall speed goes down instead of up for more than a few seconds, then pause the process that was last added and unpause it when at least one other process has finished. Heuristics like "two parallel operations on the same physical HDD are slower than one" still apply, but they only help to decide which process to pause.
The speed is only one reason for requesting a copy queue, many other users also want it, because loads of copy windows clutter up the desktop. It's "great" for the usability experience, when you start to manually arrange copy windows on the screen, just to see all the progress bars at once or to be able to manually pause/unpause some of them for speed. This demands for an alternative UI: The copy processes could be shown in an "download manager like" user interface: single window, columns for the current file and its progress and the progress of the whole operation. This new interface should be carefully thought through...
This is why GPSoftware don't like to comment on future releases. Plans change and then people get disappointed (fair enough) and complain about it as if it was on purpose.
Opus 10, which isn't going to come out anytime soon, isn't going to be required for Windows 7. There is only one real issue with the current Opus on Windows 7 and Jon said that'll be fixed in a free update before Windows 7 is released (and another person has reported that it's already fixed if you install Windows 7 RTM but that hasn't been confirmed yet).
[quote="leo"]This is why GPSoftware don't like to comment on future releases. Plans change and then people get disappointed (fair enough) and complain about it as if it was on purpose.[/quote]I'm a long time user of Opus, starting with version 3.41 some 17 years ago (!) on the Amiga and I'm still using it, so it seems I am not that much disappointed . I just see that the original request for this is from late 2004, which makes it four and a half years of nothing happening. This is longer than the duration between the releases of Opus 3 and Opus 5, which included something like a complete rewrite switching from the classic two lister view to multithreaded lister windows.
Meanwhile, the topic seems to pop up every now and then from different new and long time users, with numerous other users supporting it. I understand that implementing a copy queue delves deep into the multi-thread management of Opus as a whole, which makes it much more than a simple change, but one can always dream and vote for it. And please don't think I'm writing this just for myself. I've had at five colleagues of mine buy Opus because I showed them how great it is, and four years ago I told them the queue was coming. Now I'm the one being nagged why it hasn't surfaced yet...
Who said it won´t ever come in a future release? Leo only said, that the time isn´t exactly announced, to not disappoint people, when it actually takes longer.
Yes, it is a really shame, and I cannot really understand why it isn't implemented yet. It seems a pretty basic function to me. More important than a whole lot of other features that are in there.
I tried TeraCopy, and that works well with DO, but I've also tested its speed, and it is terrible. It is halve as slow as DO, and Windows 7 Explorer.
How fast different programs copy can vary between computers, especially when USB devices are involved. Sometimes a program copies in a way (or using a buffer size) which is pathologically slow on certain devices, it seems.
So some people may find Opus and/or TeraCopy and/or other things copy faster/slower. There's no one way to copy data which works best for everything.
Man, a copy queue would be a great feature. I don't know how many times I've wished that I could rearrange/pause/cancel particular parts of a copy/move job, much like one does in an FTP program.
If the next version of Opus includes queues for everything (not just copying, but for all commands as sometimes I want to copy some files and then delete the directory they were in etc.) I'll definitely pay for the upgrade.
That would be really cool. Like all actions would pass through an active script type of deal, so you could see something like
"Copy [X1] from [Location 10] to [Location 3]"
"Copy [Y1] from [Location 10] to [Location 2]"
"Copy [Y2] from [Location 10] to [Location 2]"
"Copy [Y3] from [Location 10] to [Location 2]"
"Copy [A1] from [Location 10] to [Location 6]"
"Copy [T1] from [Location 10] to [Location 1]"
and then you could add a command to the queue of
"Delete [Location 10]"
And it would tick off as they passed through. I suppose this is an idea that's one of those "should have existed in all file managers 20 years ago" things, since something akin to it is already in FTP managers anyway.
