Work around Windows' broken file copy

[ArmEagle]

Using Salamander I was copying >1GB files from a normal HDD to a USB2.0 memory stick. Copy progress would progress very quick and then halt. Clearly the read was buffered (several 100 megabytes) and then slowly written to the USB stick. Almost all my 4GB RAM is in use (normal or cached), so there's not much to be shown there. But when the cache was filled and copy progress crawled to a halt, some programs became unresponsive. I started looking around and found this article: http://blog.mischel.com/2011/06/07/wind ... revisited/. That article explains the apparent buffering/caching Windows does while files are copied. I tried one of the mentioned programs - FastCopy - and that did not show any slowdowns.

I guess Salamander uses the normal methods of copying a file. Though that simplifies things a lot, I'd love for Salamander to work around this Windows 'bug' (configurable of course). It is agonizing to see your system crawl to a halt because of this. The file copy is not made much slower and it would use much less memory.

It looks like Salamander is developed in C++ (looking at the plugin development thread). So at least it isn't near impossible to implement this.

Perhaps this can first be done in a plugin and maybe I'll look into that next week when I have time.

[Ether]

What version of Windows and Salamander are you using? If it's Salamander v3.0 beta, then the small text below applies, otherwise just ignore it.

If this is caused by using native Windows copy routines (as opposed to Salamander's own routines which are used in the current stable v2.54), which was advertised as a solution for slow copying over network, then I'd like to give a +1 to the request for a configuration option that would switch between those two (or better yet, one option for each of the different media types - harddisk, removable disk, network drive).