Hard Disks are mechanical devices. As such, they really dont cope well with being told to do two things at once with 2 files.. Our fast copying goes from nearly sequential read, to thrash thrash as the drive tries to serve up two files at once
One feature I've been hoping for since day 0 of DOpus (I was an amiga freak) is that:
DOpus knows when devices it is using, are busy (because it is copying from/to them)
Any attempt to copy from/to a busy device, is paused until the device is not busy
This would let me collate files off 3 drives onto one, and this copy op is going to take hours... So I could set D as the source, Z: is the target. Update All, then immediately go to E as the source and update all again
Instead of dying in a thrash frenzy, DOpus would queue my request like most FTP clients would, and do the E -> Z copy at when the D -> Z copy finishes.
If this were taken to the simplest level, of only doing one copy at a time, it would still be more useful than allowing the user to start mutliple copy ops.. So how about it? If things got smart, then you could work out whether any existing queued copy ops would affect a newly requested op, and if there was no effect then sure, start both going...
This has been requested in the past I believe. I too would like to see it. Perhaps as an option that can be turned off or on depending on the person.
At least that way, i can unrar multiple DVDs at once so to speak. Set one to decompress and then when the job is done, continue on to the next, then proceed to the file joining process etc...
Afaik this feature (copy queues) was slated for this release, however additional work required by Vista pushed it behind.
I hope we can expect it to be present in the next free upgrade (ie. 9.1).
[quote="FatherTime"]This has been requested in the past I believe. I too would like to see it. Perhaps as an option that can be turned off or on depending on the person.
At least that way, i can unrar multiple DVDs at once so to speak. Set one to decompress and then when the job is done, continue on to the next, then proceed to the file joining process etc...[/quote]
This is possible, have a dig through the options of the latest WinRAR. I recall seeing a setting saying "Wait if other winrar instances are active"
I will have to get the latest version, but DO has a RAR plugin that I sometimes use because it is quicker and easier.
But the queuing of processes would be nice for the following functions:
file joining or splitting processes
DO rar processes (using the DO rar plugin not Winrar)
copy and move processes
There should be a way to override the system. For instance, if i have 2 large items in a copy queue, but i want to copy a small set of photos or a document, i should be able to override the system and copy that right away instead of waiting 5min or whatever before it gets done due to the large copying processes.
Because working with RAR files (extracting, etc) is a function of the Copy EXTRACT function... if 'Copy Queue' feature is implemented you 'should' get the sort of RAR extract queueing you're looking for as part of the base 'Copy' command queuing support...
Well that's not really true. It was once. Yes it is a mechanical device but the cache system plus the interleaved sector systems on simple drives or raid arrays means that this is not really a great problem with modern hard drives. Many thinks are accessing the hard drive at the same time including windows caching etc..
For reference, we have had a copy queue planned for some time, and you will see on one day, but it requires very deep changes for the multithreaded nature of Opus.
