RapidCopy 4+

This app is a mixed bag, depending on what matters to you and whether you understand what is going on well enough to make it work for you. Think of it like driving a stick instead of an automatic.

First, copy speed. (After all, the app is called RapidCopy.) I ran a bunch of rough tests using large (~100 GB) copy jobs and many (~25,000) files of varying sizes. Copies were done among a fusion drive (essentially a SSD for current purposes) and a couple of Seagate USB3.0 external drives.

The place where RapidCopy gives the greatest benefit is copying from a HDD ONTO ITSELF. RapidCopy does the sensible thing and copies a bunch of stuff into memory, then writes the stuff out onto disk. That keeps the drive from having to rapidly jump back and forth between read and write operations. I typically got about 50% speed improvements.

When copying from a HDD onto either a second HDD or the fusion I typically got about a 10% speed improvement with RapidCopy.

Copying from the fusion drive (effectively a SSD at this point) onto a HDD, RapidCopy and drag and drop were usually a wash. (Not surprising as both are limited by write speeds on the HDD.)

When copying from SSD to itself, drag and drop tended to clean RapidCopy's clock. I presume (i.e., wild guess) that's because Apple's code is clever and tells the SSD to shuffle stuff internally while RapidCopy is still reading stuff in and writing it back out.

(These are by no means formal, careful benchmarks. But since no benchmark information is given by the vendor, they are better than nothing.)

Both RapidCopy and drag and drop seemed to outperform available versions of command line utlities like cp -r and rsync, but I did not test those extensively.

As noted by others, RapidCopy DOES provide a bunch of additional control and insight as compared with drag and drop. But you have to need and understand them to get the benefit. Those parameters like buffer size and whether to use one or two threads matter.

Unfortunately the only way to get BY FAR the greatest benefit from RapidCopy is to go to the vendor's site, track down the page for RapidCopy, and download the RC_MultiLauncher app. MultiLauncher allows you to queue up a bunch of big copy jobs that will run in series rather than in parallel. That capability (which is what earned the 4 stars) is what makes the app worthwhile if you want to set up a lot of copying and then let it run efficiently while you go about living your life. Don't ask me why MultiLauncher isn't part of the App Store distribution.

Summary: Once upon a time RapidCopy and its Windows predecessor were probably the bomb; that is less true today because Apple actually writes pretty good code. But if you are copying TB of data from here to there on a semiregular basis, are willing to play with the knobs a bit, want more insight and control, and take the trouble to track down RC_MultiLauncher, the app might be worth the twenty bucks.

Even though, this app is great for simple checksum backups, it's capable of doing so much more. Hopefully they'll update to support latest mac OS (Big Sur)

In my job, I use FastCopy on a regular basis to ensure that large copies and moves are completed successfully and accurately. Happy to find its equivalent on macOS.